Recent reviews by Madican

I'll start by saying I do recommend this game, though by the end of it I was ready for it to be over.

Afterimage is a Metroidvania to the core, where you traverse large expanses fighting enemies, finding areas you can't access yet that you'll need to come back to later with new movement abilities, and a map that literally cannot fit on my widescreen monitor at even 10% of actual size. It also dabbles a bit in the Soulsy stuff with bonfires, losing accumulated EXP on death (though you can't lose levels), and various builds you can play with depending on weapons, subweapon, and up to three accessories. It does this all reasonably well.

The story is...less coherent than the gameplay design. Like Souls stuff it really wants you to gather pieces of the story and put it together to get an idea of what happened to the world and things you can do to maybe fix things. Unfortunately even after collecting all the lore the story is still kind of incomplete in some details. I've been told some stuff may need programming knowledge to fully grasp but no idea how much of that is the actual case. Regardless, the main story is mostly complete enough to know what's what and that's good enough, even if the postgame decides to throw a curveball into it.

Overall I would recommend this game to anyone who wants a solid Metroidvania like I did. My main quibbles are mostly with the story and I know that's not everyone's primary concern, if it's even one at all.

First off, I would not recommend this game to people because it is neither a porn game nor a "serious" JRPG, but rather tries to be both and falls flat as a result.

The story and world building are constantly at odds with the main character and his shenanigans. The story wants to do things like point out the trauma of rape victims, the fact that victims are literally marked by the rules of that world's deity along with the ones who actually committed the crime, and how anyone with the mark is seen as not only nonhuman but someone who should be killed on sight. The main character wants to star in a comedy wherein he is constantly thinking about sex, he literally only cares about women and having sex with women, and sought the position of Knight for the sole purpose of being able to have multiple wives so he can have all the sex without being literally branded because the same deity excludes Knights from the rules.

On the one hand you have a game that could have been a serious JRPG touching on very mature themes. On the other hand you have a game that could have been a comedic porn game featuring harem shenanigans. In trying to be both at the same time though, the result is middling at best and absolutely tone deaf at worst. A real shame, because I can see interesting elements in the world building that are then drowned out by the other stuff.

Is fun. Give badge.

This, is not a very good game. Combat is simultaneously punishing and broken, depending on whether or not you can get off the highest-tier of magic against bosses who will otherwise mash your face into the floor. Regular enemies swarm in large numbers with little way to figure out where the snipers are aiming from because the camera is too focused on making sure you lose as much health as possible. Storywise the game starts with a relatively interesting premise and then proceeds to utterly bomb it as hard as it possibly can. However, there are a couple endings and one of them is amusing just for the sheer wtf-ery it gives to the primary antagonist. Even so, it can't save this game from its own flaws.

Oh boy oh boy, a word game with a sprinkle of dungeon crawler where I fling as many words as I can come up with at hordes of fantasy enemies! Right? Well, sort of.

First is the battle system. You get ten letter tiles per dungeon and those letters aren't used up or able to be switched out for the entire dungeon. Get a glut of consonants and not many vowels? Sucks to be you, have fun getting halfway through the dungeon and then be unable to come up with any more words. Oh, and each word can only be used once, barring plurals or verbs. So you can use the word "saw" and you can also use the words "sawed" and "saws". The length of a word determines its power and by association your ability to get through the dungeon. So a bad set of letters means you're screwed from the get-go. Not really the free-form word-slinging dungeon crawl I was expecting.

Next is the equipment system. As you ascend the tower you unlock new wands, robes, and hats with their own special abilities. Each of these is able to be upgraded as well, a necessity as you find enemies who hit harder than you can withstand or are resistant to the damage of your best wand. By itself this is fine, even welcome, but where it loses my favor is how the necessary gold needed is not even close to the amount you earn by progressing. You can re-do a previous floor for a Challenge Reward but you can only get each Reward once per floor. So sure, you can earn 3,000 gold on your first clear of a Challenge but if you go back to that same floor you get maybe 400 gold per pass. Oh, and that new wand costs 22,000. Get grinding. You can of course opt to sell the items sometimes dropped on a floor, but each one where I'm at on Floor 37 sells for either 75 or 150 gold. Yeah, really raking in the dough there.

Either of these problems alone probably wouldn't be an issue. If I could choose my words I could speed clear floors for gold and have fun doing it. If I could redo Challenge floors I could deal with the limited board. But when you combine them both you have entire floors where unless you are a human dictionary you are doomed from the get-go even after spending your time farming a colossal amount gold to upgrade your wand once. Ramming your head against enemies again and again and again.

It's not like my vocabulary is small. I write as a hobby and people seem to consider it to be pretty good. Left to my own devices I can construct a plethora of words at 72 per minute last I was officially tested. And that was just typing what was in front of my face. When I'm writing on my own I get much faster. None of that meant anything to this game though and it seemed less like it was testing my typing/writing abilities and a lot more on how many words I could pick out of a limite pool within a short time frame repeatedly.

Perhaps others will like this game more than I did, but personally I am not recommending this game. There's got to be better ones out there. The bar's not especially high.

This is the first Shantae I played to completion. I've played a little bit of Risky's Revenge but otherwise I was going into this blind. It's a very short game, six levels in total with some goodies to find in each one. However, I do remember that two of those levels were Kickstarter stretch goals. DLC. So that would put the main game at four levels discounting those two "episodes" that may be part of the main progression but honestly they just come out of nowhere in the storyline without any semblance of transition and once they're wrapped up that's it no one mentions them again. Story was nothing to write home about either. It's your standard Goody Two Shoes vs Supreme Badness black and white plot. Shantae learns of a great threat to the Genie Realm, promptly forgets as she helps her uncle build a machine, does some other hero stuff, then oh no Genie Realm is now in danger because the villain is trying to destroy everything for some unexplained reason.

I found all the collectibles in this game, explored all the hidden areas, found all the dances, spells, items, etc. A big issue though is that the forms are either useless or only needed for one or two areas in the game then shove them in the box. There's 16 total dances (there's a damn BLOBFISH dance that does nothing) and you make use of three or four on a regular basis, mostly Monkey. There's also two that break the game open completely: Bat and Harpy. Bat lets you move horizontally as long as you don't have any obstacle. Harpy is free flight. In a platforming game this pretty much lets you cheese entire levels with some creative positioning.

My playtime clocked in at a little over 7 hours and I was taking my time. For a $20 game, though I did Kickstart it. This is a very, very, VERY short game and I honestly cannot recommend it at this price point. It doesn't feel cohesive in gameplay, story, or anything really. I'm actually disappointed I backed it. Supposedly it will eventually have a story where you play through as Risky Boots and others but they're not in yet so, what you see is what you get.

Hmm. Blade Kitten looked interesting at first glance, but it wasn't able to keep up with that first impression. The story as far as I played was non-existent other than chasing a blonde girl just to exchange insults when you catch up so she can run off again. That's it. No reason, no explanation, no world-building whatsoever. It's a catgirl with a sword chopping up lots of generic guards. I wasn't expecting a literary marvel but come on I at least want some kind of plot thread that's not out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

The combat did not gel with me either. Combat for the most part consists of swinging the sword, and having it blocked, or trying to swing the sword and getting stunlocked by two enemies kicking you repeatedly. I looked at the Blade menu and found out the swords had stats, but they don't seem to do anything. I bought the Grengis which had near max stats in all categories except Recharge, while boasting that it would break through any defense. Hah, no. No change at all in combat. I still get blocked and kicked and stabbed. It also doesn't help that everything is extremely floaty, so there's no feeling of solid control. More like I'm sliding around and slashing haphazardly.

All in all I don't recommend Blade Kitten. There's nothing worth playing here unless you really happen to like pink-haired catgirls that the game tries to tell you is a top-tier bounty hunter with a serious face.

Child of Light is a relatively simplistic RPG with minor platforming elements, mostly because one can fly around at will early in the game, with a motley crew of characters on a quest to defeat a Big Bad. By the book, but that's okay. The story revolves around Aurora, a princess who apparently died in the real world and woke up in the land of Lemuria, where the Queen of Night has taken the sun, moon, and stars. Very fairy tale.

I've played the game almost to completion, literally being in the final area, and as I played this game something was bothering me. I couldn't figure out why, but I did not like the game. The music is fantastic, the battle system simple but complex in its nuances, the characters had character, and the environment was like flying through a painting. But I still didn't like it. I asked some friends, and one suggested that it was because it didn't form a cohesive whole, but that wasn't it. Then I finally realized why.

It's because the game is hollow; it has no soul. The characters are archetypes who never break out of their roles to become rounded, the story is strictly leading the player around in a linear fashion with no hidden depths to plumb, and the music fades into the background of notice when there isn't much variety to it. Child of Light is just a thin coat of paint on a canvas, something to look at, maybe remark on, but there is no meaning to the art and I therefore have no reason to play it.

I came into Darksiders expecting a God of War and Zelda mashup with lots of Biblical imagery and a cardboard cutout of "War" smashing things like Hulk. What I got was just as expected, aside from War, who is a much deeper character than I initially thought.

The game plays out pretty well, starting easy and showing all the neat stuff War can do so you can get a feel for his power before the tutorial is over and you have nothing. From there it's a smash-em-up beatfest of demons and angels alike to clear his name, and lemme tell you the plot is above-standard for this sort of thing. When I played God of War I played a guy who was out to kill a god and damn anyone who got in his way because of personal vengeance. When I played Darksiders I saw War thinking things through, talking with people rather than outright attacking them, and his goal was to clear his name so he could do his ultimate duty as a Horseman of the Apocalypse. He's not doing this whole song and dance for himself, he's doing it to keep the balance of existence.

Ultimately I would recommend this game to anyone who likes a modern twist on the Apocalypse, loves to collect things, has fun figuring out God of War combos, and enjoys a good story with a decent challenge when playing on the highest difficulty.