Source: Kickstarter backer.
Price: £15.99 (£3.99 for Ray expansion)
Where To Get It: Lots of places.

Hoo boy. Having had a troubled release (Which I sort of missed), I had some trepidation going into Mighty No. 9. And I was right to do so. This is one review where I’m not swimming against the tide, because, as you may have gathered from the almost unanimous opinion, Mighty No. 9 is aggressively mediocre, and a lack of effort shines blearily through every muddy moment.

It is the year 20ZZ. Facial expressions are forever frozen. Brains, brains, brains.

So much so, that I can’t really think of anything nice to say. If I was extremely charitable, I’d say it looks kind of nice… Except that facial animations, even “Mouth opens and closes”, was apparently too much effort, and, much like some games I’ve seen over the years, the game’s look has become actively worse since the early days… Somehow. It mystified me with Breach and its UI. It mystified me with Colonial Marines. It mystifies me moreso with Mighty No. 9 because… For fuck’s sake, it is a Megaman variant. You run. You jump. You shoot. You dash. How can you screw that up?

By not pacing well. By making your power somewhat dependent on a combo system that… Seems only to be based on a “No hit” rule, because the enemies are too widely spaced for anything else. The voice acting may not be quite as awful as some folks have suggested, but it’s actively made worse by the aforementioned lack of facial animations… And dashing into bosses to hurt them? Is an idea that works erratically, depending on which boss you fight. Said combo system is unclear, to boot. Why did I get that piercing shot boost for five seconds again?

It’s depressing. Even taken on its own, it’s a slow game, with lacklustre animation, level design, and sound design, and I can almost feel a collective shrug-and-meh from IntiCreates… Through their game. And it would be less depressing if it weren’t for the fact that all the interesting ideas seem to have been dropped, in favour of…

I feel you, Round Digger.

…Well, “Better than nothing” has almost become a meme (Along with some cringeworthy marketing later in the process), and it would sum up Mighty No. 9 well, except for a tabletop truism that applies equally well to computer games.

Better no game than a bad one. Don’t bother, if you hadn’t already.

The Mad Welshman sighed. He didn’t even feel strongly enough to come up with something amusing to do after the review. Even kicking puppies felt pointless.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Enter the Gungeon is, at its core, entertaining. But it is definitely not the kind of entertaining that suits everybody. I’ll try to unpack that as we go along, but essentially, it’s a procedurally generated twin stick shooter set in… The Gungeon, home of more ammunition and projectile weapon puns than you can shake a boomstick at, along with a gun that can kill… The past. CUE OMINOUS MUSIC!

See? It’s got a parchment drawing and everything, it’s obviously both important and super cursed!

The game itself is pretty responsive, and, much like other procedural twin-sticks like Binding of Isaac or Nuclear Throne, I almost never feel like dying is anything but a failure on my part, as there’s quite a few tools to deal with the swarm of bullets that will head your way, including that most important one, the dodge roll with generous invincibility frames, and the limited “Blanks”, which destroy all visible bullets, and slightly knock back enemies. There’s a variety of guns, a variety of enemies, and a number of secrets and unlocks that were enough to stump the collective player base for all of a week or two (Which doesn’t sound like much, until you look at the guides, and realise how much was there to be discovered. So, er, go you, fellow players of Enter the Gungeon!)

However, the game likes keeping its secrets perhaps a little too much. I thankfully know what most of the items do as I get them, although rarely before I’ve used them for the first time, but the guns? I have no idea if a Wind-Up Gun (Which gets weaker the further into the clip it goes, as its spring firing mechanism winds down, presumably) is better or worse than the Barrel of Fish (Shoots fish, and an associated small puddle. Oh, and it sometimes stuns enemies), or the trusty RPG (Which… Well, blows things up but good, and is slow to fire and load.)

The Gatling Gull: Buff and violent. It killed a pig once, although it was aiming for a Gungeoneer.

I get it, really I do. It’s like potions and weapons in a “proper” Roguelike (Quote marks fully intended), where you don’t know what a thing will do until you try it or somehow identify it, but I’m specifically mentioning the guns because I know that’s going to be a turn off for some, and I’d rather they knew now than getting all ranty later. Similarly, the difficulty in levels can also be somewhat erratic, to the point where I dread the mention of certain bosses, such as the Beholster (Has quite a few potential attacks), or the Gatling Gull in a completely open arena (Where I know most of the fight is going to be dodge rolling rather than shooting), while simply shrugging at others, such as The Bullet King, whose patterns are pretty easy to pin down. Enemies, also, are somewhat inconsistent, as a room full of bullet bats is a case of “Er, is this threatening?”, while Lead Maidens and the setup of a certain possible level 1 encounter (Screenshotted below) makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Basically, I’m saying it likes its mystery a bit much, and I think the difficulty “curve” is a bit… Inconsistent.

By no means the most difficult encounter in the game. Not even close.

Otherwise, the music isn’t bad, the sound effects are varied and, in some cases, suitably meaty, the visuals are consistent and well put together, so the main thing I’d really have to say about Enter the Gungeon is that your mileage will vary a little, but will vary a lot more if you don’t like mystery about those things wot you’re firing other things from. I’m not really going to comment on the story, firstly because I have yet to complete a loop of the Gungeon, and secondly because… Well, you’re not really encountering all too much of it except towards the end. Overall, Enter the Gungeon is definitely a case of “Your Mileage May Vary.”

The Mad Welshman rolled behind a table. Someone was trying to kill him, and they were bullet shaped… THINK, DAMMIT, THINK… Do I know this casing?

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

The dark future, it seems, involves pretty numbers going up. Also shooting people in the face, sometimes nauseating camera, and strange facial proportions. With Defragmented, the time comes to play a reviewer/critic’s game called “What am I deliberately ignoring?”

I love the expressions… It’s just the odd facial proportions that turn me off. And yes, that probably isn’t what you want to hear today, Mai.

This is a pretty simple game, although not how it sounds. In this game, you note down what features you didn’t really need to use, and which ones you didn’t want to use, and why. Then you ask how it differed from what appears to be the intended experience. So let’s talk about the intended experience in Defragmented first.

Defragmented is meant to be a cyberpunk Hotline Miami, where death is quick, restarting is just as quick, and you’re scored on how quickly you killed your targets, how little you died, and how thoroughly you looted everything. There are, however, problems, and one of them is that it also expects you to use special RPG abilities, level up, switch inventory, and read a plot that doesn’t appear to change with your class.

Oh, did I mention there are classes, with different abilities, different starting weapons, and this… Doesn’t seem to really matter in the long run? Silly me! Yes, you shoot with left click, throw grenades with right click, open things and push things with E, hit things up close with, er… Q… And abilities on F. This would sound fine, if it weren’t for the required action time. Specifically, the moment an enemy sees you, they’re going to fill the screen with tracers, and odds are you’re going to die. Other reasons you might die include “The enemy spotted me from a long way away” , “My ability/gun didn’t do as much damage as I thought it would” , and “Something was blocking the use of my ability/gun that I didn’t quite see because it blends with the wall/floor.”

Pictured: Just some of the confusion that’s going to arise. That’s just one shooting. Go in the front door, and anything up to three folk will do this.

Why doesn’t it matter in the long run? Because most of the abilities are very, very situational, whereas a) Having a gun with bigger numbers, and b) Shooting them repeatedly before they see you nearly always works. Nearly being the operative phrase, because guns have accuracy, which means… Sometimes they won’t hit. Meanwhile, loot is procedurally generated, which… Isn’t terribly useful. Similarly, perspective camera isn’t terribly useful because it then moves around your mouse pointer, and aiming becomes somewhat different, which… Is not recommended when you have maybe half a second to kill the other person before they kill you. Or when there’s an open elevator pit in the near vicinity.

So this, in essence, is the core problem. The only thing that’s really reliable are enemy positions. Loot is procedurally generated, so you could go several levels without a decent gun, the offensive powers don’t seem to scale with the enemies, and melee is… Largely ignorable, due to a similar unreliability. Special abilities, similarly, can be decidedly iffy, to the point where relying on them is a bad idea. It’s a game I want to like, because it has some cool ideas, some interesting designs, and a moderately entertaining story in which the Via Ascensio, home of Cyber-Psychics, is trying to overthrow the Ascended Council, who are corrupt conservatives. Okay, it sounds a lot better in the game, as does the music, but… The game’s got a bit of a conflict going on between its need for twitch, and the more thoughtful end of things, and this is leading to difficulties. Perhaps if the enemies didn’t react immediately, that balance would be a little bit more in favour. But while it’s entertaining, and tuneful, I’m not a fan of either enemies who can shoot you from off screen (Mission 1-2, even with the camera changes in a recent patch), or the uncertainty that any of my plans beyond “Shoot it a lot” will actually work.

I definitely don’t grudge the simple visuals, but the camera (And the neon) takes getting used to.

But who knows, maybe you’ll do better than I, or see what I’m missing here. After all, for all that it’s hard as nails, and the dying in the same places can get frustrating, death doesn’t really have a consequence (You just restart the mission instantly), so it can definitely be completed. I just wish it didn’t feel like difficulty for the sake of difficulty.

The Mad Welshman can always count on Deal-EO. Powers, politics, safety… None of these things could be trusted. But Deal-EO gave him the other thing he trusted. Guns. Lots of guns.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Defect is possibly the oddest premise I’ve seen for a build and fly game in a while, but before we begin, like the game, I’d like to make clear which version of the word the title’s using. You’d think, considering the “Spaceship Destruction Simulator”, that it would be as in “Problem or flaw”, but no, it’s actually “Join an opposing side or political group.” Because that’s what your crew does. Every. Sodding. Time.

Every. Single. Bloody. Time.

It’s amusing the first five times it happens. Then you get horrified. What kind of civilisation encourages such disloyalty? Then you just get plain angry. How dare they steal your… Okay, for the first few missions it’s not going to be a sweet ride. But part of the difficulty curve is that you’ll be going up against that ship you built last mission in among the others. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m kind of hoping it’s got a little more nuance than the same set of events each time. “Oh hey, this is now the most powerful ship in the sector! G’Bye Cap’n, we’ll put it to good use!” “Oh… Well, surely that won’t happen next time, huh?”

I’m thinking of defecting myself, engineer lady. It comes from working for a navy that’s obviously a big shower of assholes, the way everyone keeps mutineering. Speaking of, why do they keep letting Crewman Bowie back into the Navy? Why do I keep letting him back onto my ship?!?

Well, okay, we all know the reasons, but still… Everyone in this universe is dumb. But is the game?

Not really, no. The main variation is in what you can build, which increases after each mission. Good example, after I’m done with the tutorial missions, I finally get a shield. Which, unfortunately, I can’t use without some other facet of my ship suffering right now… Like decent guns. Or steering. The UI, and the music, are nice and minimalist, and I do like the caricature designs of the characters who, variously, advise and annoy you. The one problem I have right now, though, is a bit of a weird one…

Take a look at that zoom meter on the right. That will give you *some* idea…

…The maps are too big. On the one hand, this is to allow the frankly huge designs you get later in the game, and fight pretty early on. But for at least the early missions? You’re quite small. And that means you don’t really get to see your ship in action, except as a tiny thing on screen, shooting at other, possibly as tiny things on screen. An automatic zoom helps with this, but it unfortunately doesn’t help that much in the early game. Also not helping is that you are very limited by your Core, and you have to work with that, which becomes… Very fiddly. Seven or eight missions in, and you’re going to wish you had something better. Which leads to the other problem… It’s not very balanced right now, and it seems like you’re pretty much expected to grind missions you’re good at so you can have the equipment to deal with those you don’t. Good example, the game is reminding me why I hate escort missions.

“Oh yeah, defend this freighter against some pirates, and… OH NO, TORPEDO BOMBERS.” Fuck. You. My choices at the time this mission comes up (And three others of its ilk) are something nippy and tough, but with next to no firepower; something able to turn on a dime, but with only forward firing weapons (Because turrets take up more crew than I’m comfortable with); or something that shoots well, shoots in many directions, but has armour thin as tissue paper. This is about where I got frustrated, because everything currently needing work starts giving you a kicking, like a schoolyard bully and his mates. The camera wants to encompass as many enemies as possible, so you have to fight the auto camera to avoid the torpedoes, which will kill you in one, maybe two shots. The game’s preference for forward firing weapons means you have to fight the steering of your design, and the fact that nearly everything is faster than you, because the engines aren’t quite balanced, means that you’ll die… Again… And again… And again, because you can’t quite build something useful.

Yeah, um… Good luck with that!

Then you go back to grind, and realise most of the rewards up till now have been mission rewards. So your rate of new equipment slows to a crawl.

In summary, while Defect is definitely interesting, it’s looking right now like it might be a good idea to wait and see. The mission requirements definitely outpace the equipment right now, the camera needs a bit more work, and it gets frustrating once you’re out of the tutorial. It undeniably has its cool moments, it’s UI is pretty nice (Although Symmetry mode, also, needs some work), and I kinda like what’s going on with the visuals. Thankfully, it’s a pretty early version (0.12.22076), so there’s plenty of time for the devs to balance things, and fix hiccups.

The Mad Welshman sighed as he tumbled through space, waiting for the pickup. You’d think, after the 253rd time, that he’d remember to lock the bridge door.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £6.99 , £10.99 for the deluxe edition, which includes the map they didn’t really put in the game.
Where To Get It: Steam, itch.io, Humble Store

I liked the Souls games. I loved Shadow of the Colossus. I like me some Metroidvanias (I 100%ed Symphony of the Night at least once, which was… A thing.) I don’t mind me exploration. But Aquatic Adventures of The Last Human feels, to me, like it didn’t really learn from them. It tried. Bless it, it tried. But I feel like core lessons weren’t learned. Let’s go into that.

Where’s the Upper Harpoon, you say? Only once you find enough upgrades, cabrone!

First up, the first weapon. I found it, was led into a room that looked suspiciously like a boss arena, and lo… It was. This would all be well and good, if the first weapon wasn’t the thing it was. But the first weapon was a harpoon. That only fires from the bottom of your craft, because reasons. Not just that, but a really slow to charge harpoon. We’re talking a good three or so seconds between max charge shots. Which, as you might expect when the boss is an annelid around 100 times larger than your ship, about as useful as a wet fart in a diving suit. Let’s compare that for a second with, say, the Souls games and SotC, shall we?

In the souls games, similarly, you start with utter tat, and similarly, the bosses feel more like you’re giving them a tattoo than actually harming them, the first time through. But firstly, that changes rather rapidly, and secondly, no matter what you’re doing, you’re quite obviously giving it your all. There’s a sense of effort to connect with, a struggle for life, that shows in every grunting, snarling, huffing movement you make. Similarly, in Shadow of the Colossus, once you find a colossus, the fight does take ages, but you don’t mind because the entire struggle is visceral… You have to hold on for dear life, jump on something that could squash you like a bug with a mis-step, and when you do manage to do something? Oh my, the accomplishment!

The story of humanity is apparently a struggle between Terrorist BluePeace, and an increasingly authoritaria- Wait, where are you going?

There is none of that in the early fights of Aquatic Adventures. What there is is “wokawokawOkAwOkAWOKAWOKAWOKAWOKA- CHUNK”, except for the times when certain attacks occur, when it becomes “brmbrmbrmbrmbrm ch-ch-ch-ch.” Those are the sounds, specifically, of charging up your harpoon to attack at its highest damage and range (piddling), and the sounds of avoiding projectiles of some sort while firing your harpoon at its weakest as quickly as you can (About twice a second, at an estimate.)

In other fights, in other worlds, other games, I at least feel something. But in the early fights of Aquatic Adventures, I feel, at best, like some brigadier calmly calling “Chap with the flukes, five rounds… Er… As rapidly as you can manage, private.” And then, occasionally, something will kill me that I didn’t even see coming. Because the other thing this game doesn’t do well is readability.

Make no mistake, it’s pretty. I appreciated how different strata of this underwater world feel different: From the top, which is relatively simple outposts, the last remnants of a now dead humanity, to Settlement Seven, media dominated, with generators and television screens that have somehow survived several millennia of saltwater corrosion (Somewhat optimistically), to Central, the dark, authoritarian part of our slow descent into extinction. But navigating these areas, and more, are somewhat of an annoyance, as many are dark, and all of them are somewhat hard to read. Similarly, the majority of underwater creatures (In the beginning at least) aren’t hostile, but I spent the first thirty minutes shooting inoffensive fish because… Well, I couldn’t be sure. As it turned out, the thing I didn’t even see coming was one of the second boss’ attacks. Which is a good point to mention the bosses.

The Tranquil, about two minutes after it started annoying me…

I thought, after the first few fights, that it would become less tedious. It didn’t. Even with charge upgrades, and a saw to get me new areas, my choices of boss were a fish that constantly healed itself unless I destroyed, er… The bits of itself it was shooting out, then eating to heal; An octopus which required slowly weaking limbs, chopping them off… Aaand they came back completely for the second half. No, you don’t get a checkpoint, and no, at no point do you feel awesome for doing it. Mostly, you just get annoyed when a segment you thought you’d damaged enough wasn’t as damaged as you thought, or you got damaged despite having the saw, and that kills you, forcing you to do the whole tedious mess… All… Over… Again. Oh, and while it would be spoilers to mention where a certain useful utility power up would be, suffice to say, it’s in the very last place you would look.

This is the worst part. The music is good. The visual aesthetic (once you ignore what the nice gamma slider person says) is okay. But this is a game about the end of humanity (Apparently through several terminal cases of stupidity), and I… Don’t feel anything. When a boss kills me, the “You died” and restart to checkpoint just makes me sigh a little. When the messages from Blue Earth Alliance (Think Greenpeace, but definitely terrorists) turn up, I feel no reason to care. Everything I’ve come across in this game is emotionally detached, and strangely devoid of anything beyond surface detail that I can really get to grips with. That, at least, triggers an emotion or two: Sadness and feeling awkward.

This used to be above water. Now, it’s simply a curiosity.

The Mad Welshman looked at the Tranquil. The Tranquil gazed back with its giant yellow eyes. And The Mad Welshman started singing “I Crush Everything”, for no good reason he could name.

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