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The story stuff just gets in the way & I wish there were more remixes, & maybe they could have included a few of the swipe-based DS games, but it's just very nice to have all the best rhythm heaven minigames in one place. Probably my favorite Nintendo franchise, bummer that it doesn't have more of a following & is probably dead for the foreseeable future
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Captures the feel of Tony Hawk movement better than any other game I've played. Got some very small quibbles about the weapon & enemy design but it's still lightyears better than modern combat games like Doom, God of War, Spiderman (not least of which because it's very clear about when you're going to get attacked from off screen) and it's incredible how well it blends together the movement, gunplay, tricks, and scoring systems. Like playing recent games with similar systems has made me question if it was even possible to make those things cohere in the way that I want, since I would always find 1 or 2 major issues preventing them from gelling together, but Rollerdrome is a good reminder that that cohesive design is actually possible when your game isn't stuffed with needless progression/loot/gacha systems to pad out playtime.
Only real issue with the game is that its budget is very clear. There's def enough here to justify the price, but I want more. The budget is also clear in the story/theming. The music & visuals sell the 70s dystopian bloodsport thing well, but there isn't much of anything to the story, no commentary or narration during gameplay, and it reuses 1 boss twice.
All told I love it, but I couldn't help but compare it to my GOTY last year, BoomerangX, which is similarly scoped, similarly excellent in it's gameplay feel & systemic cohesion, but in using a more abstract theme that doesn't need as big of a budget to pull of as what Rollerdrome is going for, Boomerang feels like a full, cohesive experience, that almost transcends its mechanics, while Rollerdrome feels like an excellent collection of levels.
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The handful of frustrating or confusing levels or ones that just exacerbate the issues with the camera stand out in my head a lot, but the 90 other ones are a joy and even those "bad" ones are usually interesting or weird or silly in a way that I can appreciate with some distance. Really every level is going for something and I respect the hell out of that. The pure joy of moving the ball & interacting with the physics never gets old, even when the objectives are obtuse, and the story and aesthetic wrapper is just pure goofy fun. Woulda probably liked my playthrough more if I'd started on the steam deck, playing on a tv mainly for the first half made it hard to pick up & try a level and I think this structure is much better suited to being able to pick at in short bursts.
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Perfect little phone game. Wish it was longer. Really wish that Downwell had had similar touch focused controls instead of just virtual buttons. Kinda lame that we gotta have subscriptions to get this style of game without disgusting monetization but I guess it’s better than nothing.
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Pretty dang good overall but most of my issues come from the fact that it's using Doom 2016 as the base for the movement and gunplay. The arenas of almost random enemies spawning without much real level design feels more forgivable here, though, since the moment to moment gameplay is much more engaging because of the rhythm systems, which it pulls off way better than any other game of this type I've tried (tho maybe I should give BPM another shot someday).
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As fun to move around in as 2 and nearly as creative in level design but the arcade structure pulls it down for me
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Love the way Ranger plays. The movement and guard stuff is stiffer than I want but the combo system & pressure are super fun. Having more fun grinding this than any other fighter in a while. I like that the skill ceiling in visible from where I'm at - I'm never going to be Daru, but I can do most of the stuff the best Ranger players are doing already.
Unfortunately the pc port is rough and the game seems to stutter weirdly which really drags down the feel. But, the fact that it runs well enough on the steam deck and has an input system that works well enough there that I can lab stuff on the train is really really nice.
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Really not sure how to rate this one. On one hand I respect the hell out of it, everything here feels so tailored to the experience of being a kid, going on a dumb little make believe adventure with your friends in a park or small forest or whatever. Its humor and art and music are just a perfect celebration of childhood and I really can't think of anything else that captures that so clearly.
But on the other hand, it's also made with the intention of being played by kids - for them to pick away at and discover it over months and months of it being the only game they play, or binge a ton of it and power through the difficulty and lost progress by sheer virtue of having the time to spend with it and I find that that design is extremely incompatible with the way I, & I expect most adult game-players, consume media nowadays.
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Really nice to have one of these that I can just burn through in a weekend. I tend to play this kind of game obsessively for a few weeks and then drop off completely (usually without finishing them) so I really appreciate the smaller scope here, though by the time I was getting through the final area I was a bit tired of it and had pretty much exhausted the village management so that killed my momentum a bit. I had a weird time with the combat - partially cuz the steam deck version had some input & stutter issues around launch (things like disabling vsync probably make it easier to play now) so I really had to develop a hit & run style which I had fun with but ultimately made the luck of the weapon draw super important to how much I'd enjoy/progress through a given dungeon, which even carried through to the final boss which was lame. The combat also never really challenged me in a way that warranted sacrificing villagers for buffs which seemed like a really clever system but obviously balancing difficulty for something like that is very hard. Oh also the vibe was just pretty great. I was weary of it being a bit too tryhard about the cutesy-but-dark thing but it actually came off really well I enjoyed the hell out of vibing to it in peak Spooky Season.
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Just pure and stupid arcade action. The vibes are immaculate & the game is short. Probably never gonna go back an try to 1CC but I can def see myself loading it up co op a bunch of times.
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Really cool style and the story premise is great, even though it doesn't really go anywhere past the initial supernatural meets scifi meets religious setup. The loop itself was really fun, but, and maybe this is just cuz I don't play deck builders, I felt like the difficulty spiked early on but once I got past that hump and found a good build, I could do basically the same thing to power through the rest of the game (upgrading along the way to get through each area's boss). Maybe that's on me for looking up tips online, since I was so stumped on the first boss, but after figuring out how a few mechanics actually worked and building a deck focused on the Rogue + stacking Attack speed, I found that I could use basically the same setup for the whole game, for both resource building/upgrade grinding as well as fighting bosses. It was honestly pretty anticlimactic to beat the 3rd & 4th bosses each on my first try. Also the switch port is very good, with decent controller support and letting you use touch control in handheld mode (which is how I played most of the game) but that screen is just a bit smaller than I want and if this was on iPad or something I could see myself continuing to play it idly while watching TV and stuff, instead of just dropping it completely after rolling credits.
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Playstation Version
The main mode being ~3 times longer than the arcade mode on the previous games makes a big difference. Levels are all fun here, and the pulley mechanic is easier to get a hang of with that much time, & also there's more variety so you don't get exhausted by the pulley levels.
The gameplay here is as strong as ever, strategically thinking about how to aim you bubble & where you can bounce + the level mechanics in the pulley system, blocks that stick, & blocks that float stays engaging throughout. This game could be twice as long without adding or changing anything and I'd still be happy to lose myself into it.
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more lenient than the first game in a lot of ways, which I'm grateful for, but continues to have the same major issue that there's a lot going on in every aspect of the game that isn't ever explained to the player. Things like farming for materials, the way the progression tree works, even in-mission success & failure states are often overly granular & require so much management but it also takes trying and failing 3+ times or looking at a guide to actually understand your exact objectives & that's a bummer. Also baffling that many key abilities and systems don't get revealed until close to the end of the game. I guess it's to support replayability & Monster Hunter Style resource grinding, but most Monster Hunters give you a target to meet, here it feels like grinding just for the sake of grinding, since the main story and most optional bosses can be beat without digging too much into the grind.
That stuff aside, it's still patapon, the core gameplay is still very joyful, the resource & combat loop is still very fun once you get into it.
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Great combat, maybe best in class for a 3d brawler outside of the generally mid bosses, but genuinely too stressful to finish my playthrough. Every level brings a new tier of bullshit that I don't want to deal with. Tempted to start over on the easier difficulty, but I'm already more than halfway through, so that's a really unappealing idea. I think if it was just the nonstop, fast paced combat, I would power through it to see the end, but the level gimmicks like forcing me to run on water while dealing with rocket launcher enemies above ground and respawning mines below pushes it over the edge.
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Played about 20 hrs before just getting a bit bored? Maybe I read too much into the reviews and trailers making it seem like Breath of the Wild, but it really just feels like Bigger Dark Souls 3. Which is fine, obviously a lot of people are enjoying that but I'm just bored with that style of game at this point. I like Fromsoft the best when they're closer to linear Action games, like they did with Sekiro & Bloodborne, going back to the dungeon crawling style of Elden Ring feels kinda like a chore in comparison. The open world looks really cool, but navigation is totally frictionless and almost every point of interest ends in a bit of combat or another small (or sometimes annoyingly large) dungeon so the whole game feels very one-note.
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(Replay/DE First time) The animations and movement feel just a slight bit stiff & start-stop-y but otherwise I'm enjoying the flexibility which the angel/demon weapons add to combos and the 2 grapple options make handling spacing in combat really fun. Not as huge a fan of the reliance on a dodge button instead of the jump system from previous games and I'm too used to doing back+y to launch so using B for that still feels weird halfway into the game. Story is still hard to watch and the platforming is less interesting than I remembered it being but maybe it'll get more involved later.
Level design in the back half is incredible, though, not just the TV level that everyone talks about, but the whole heist thing and the dance club all rule.
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Largely similar to 2, but it feels a bit more lenient and easier to control, and has some fun, wider level designs while still being a simple & breezy lil experience. The addition of ceiling bounces is rad, but the game almost never gives you reason to use them.
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Generally went on for longer than I wanted and the combat & platforming were serviceable but unremarkable (actively dragging down the story at worst in a few cases) but the story here and the space it gives double fine to create these weird goofy little spaces was great. Appreciate the care they took in handling the initially-silly premise of diving into people's brains and fixing them.
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(Replay) More slight than I remembered. Main story is extremely pared down, even moreso than something like Journey. Controls were a bit unweildy at first, but started to grow on me as I figured out how to chain dashes. Still great to vibe out to for 90ish minutes.
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Arcade Version
mechanics feel about the same as the 3rd game but the frequent use of the pulley mechanic made this one a bit more frustrating. The way it's presented is very obtuse, initially & by the time I felt like I understood how to play around it properly I was already on the last level. I appreciate it as a mechanic overall, especially because it makes ceiling bounces more interesting, but it messes up the difficulty curve of the game in a big way so I prefer 3 overall.
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Looks and feels immediately and starkly better than the first game, and i think the bubble physics are a bit more lenient, too, which made lining up big cascades a lot more satisfying.
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Great combat, awful level design. Just glad I got my replay of this done so I can move on to DmC & V.
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Minimalism to a fault. The base aesthetic & flow is very strong and basically carries everything else. The main priority seems to be more about extending play time based on progression rather than making a satisfying game that you want to play because of the intrinsic joy of playing it. Every gameplay system should in theory reinforce and flow into each other, but either minor misteps in the implementation or intentional nerfing makes them frustratingly disparate. For example, the wingsuit is set up as a tool to extend combos, like a manual in Tony Hawk, but the fact that it loses charge while you're doing a combo discourages you from doing a long combos. They could have fixed that by having the combo recharge the draining wingsuit in real time, but no, you only get the charge after landing. Not to mention that the entire opportunity for comboing in the first place is restricted by the level being generated, which often just doesn't give you more things to do, or even worse, spawns obstacles or gaps that you literally can't react to because the tricks and jumps are so high commitment that you almost never know where you're going to land when before you interact.
Also the fact that coins almost never line up with your actual jump arc is actually insane, that's like platformers 101. Also also, the most fun character can backflip well, but frequently loses enough speed WHILE GOING DOWNHILL that you can't make certain jumps if you don't have wingsuit charge.
All that said I've still played it a bunch but it feels like I'm doing it more cuz I don't have an alternative mindless phone game right now than because I enjoy this one that much. It still feels ok to play, but everything past the most basic movement is more frustrating than fun.
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Best puzzle bobble style game i found on mobile, since there's actual strategy and complexity to each level, but every level gimmick they add just adds a layer of frustration you have to play around (especially the clouds and vines) rather than an interesting idea to play with. Plus all the gacha stuff paired with the terrible in game rng always giving me the wrong bubble color really drains all the joy out of what should be an easy homerun.
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I wanted to play this cuz i accidentally got pretty into Touhou Spell Bubble and wanted to check out the original. The controls are a bit clunk in comparison and style is a bit flat, but the core thing of strategically popping bubbles is still extremely satisfying.
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Breezy & fine as a shooter on it's own right, but definitely a letdown as a Halo game. Feels like they really wanted to make a Uncharted or Call Of Duty style campaign and forced those design decisions onto halo enemies that don't map to that. Also the new weapons & enemies are pretty dull even tho they look cool visually.
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Way too long & not campy enough for the genre; didn't care about the characters or backstory.
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Improvement over the previous games in terms of handling, and the FMV story is a fun idea, but it didn't do much to draw me in & the game still exists in a weird space between serious track racing and super arcade-y, drift around every corner shit. Much easier to keep your car under control than in those previous games though, which I appreciate.
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Only played like an hour but honestly feel like that was enough to know what this game is. Stale bread-ass hack & slash. Very obsessed with prestige & showing off how cool & expensive & HBO Adult everything can be. I was hoping at least the combat would be fun because it looks satisfying but the glory kill stuff got boring by the end of the first real level and even though I'm generally a fan of QTEs, they're way too repetitive and plain here & the slomo actually ruins what little flow there is to the crowd management. By the start of the second level I was already actively avoiding them or waiting to stack as many kills as possible so I didn't have to watch them all one by one. It's kinda a shame cuz I like the strategy layer the game has of being able to select if the QTEs give you more XP or build focus or restore health.
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