Horace was a lot more of a roller coaster than I was expecting when I saw the cover, which to me almost looks like a LEGO knockoff. No, Horace was a full-fledged assault on all front experience. Story, gameplay, music, it’s all here! Well, maybe the music is pretty unimaginative, but it’s still pretty good. The gameplay also has its downsides, but overall solid. Actually, the story can get a bit messy too.  

So yeah, maybe it’s a mixed bag, but it’s a very full bag. 

Starting with the gameplay, Horace is a pretty interesting platforms as it starts off slow and then ramps up over time, constantly introducing new gadgets and gimmicks to keep it interesting. The whole time you’re getting used to each new mechanic, you’ve also got to worry about collecting junk, it’s Horace’s purpose after all. It also determines which ending you get, but it seems rather unnecessary. The problem comes with the pacing. Everything just goes on for a little too long, and furthermore the endless rule of x number the developers employ just seeps into your brain. You just keep seeing it all the time, almost every single level. The game could have done with some trimming and some level design that flowed a little better and have me noticing the get three this, do this four times, and so on.

There’s also a bunch of mini games that show up throughout the story, completely mandatory, and there’s a lot of them. Lot of repeated ones too, and others that show up once but intrude on the story at the most inopportune times. There can be a thin line between platformer bosses and mini games in most game, but actually having a mini game in the final boss is a bit much. 

As for the story, I loved a lot it. It was funny, charming, had twists and turns. The whole thing is told from Horace’s perspective and in his voice, which I’m sure saved a lot of money, but also created some hilarious jokes by use of this narrative device. The whole game is also very British and that style of humour permeates the tone of the game in a really fun way. 

It all starts with Horace’s birth, the tutorial is integrated well into the story, as are the later tutorials even mentioning the button pressed in universe. So much is set up and built upon and done so in an intriguing way, which is saying a lot because there are so many moving parts in this story. All the characters had dialogue that was particularly well written, probably more so than the plot, which started losing steam after a certain big event. There were a lots of risks taken, and in typical British fashion the ending it bittersweet. I think it could have been a little less bitter and a little more sweet, or perhaps had a little more closure, but overall it was satisfying. 

That’s the thing with this game, it’s full of heart and hard work, but everything just doesn’t come quite together for me. It’s like a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and around ten of them are just missing. Speaking of which the pixelated art style does wonders for the game’s character and really sells some of the game more emotional moments. It certainly gave Horace a really great happy face. The music and sound design are also great, but it uses a lot of recognisable compositions. Maybe I have liked them better if I hadn’t heard them so many times before elsewhere, but they were well implemented. 

In conclusion, Horace is certainly a game worth experiencing and I would recommend it to anyone who knows their way around a platformer. 

And I mean that, this game can get pretty tough, but maybe it’s just that I’m bad at platformers. 

The story, gameplay, and presentation are all almost totally spot on and even if you don’t like platformers you should get someone to play it for you so you can experience the story for yourself. 

Castle Kong is a nice little homage to the legendary arcade classic Donkey Kong. Complete with 22 levels to slowly jump through, its brutally difficult in sometimes completely unfair ways leaving you lost for ideas on how to progress.
 

Castle Kong follows the typical donkey kong story tasked to save a princess; however, this time, replace the plumber with a pauper and the monkey with a king. And that’s about it, sweet but straightforward save the princess and avoid whatever the king might throw your way.

The story is not where the donkey kong inspiration stops, with Castle Kong takes a lot more inspiration from the original Donkey Kong, possibly to much. The speed of the game is painfully slow. When controlling the pauper, you gain minimal momentum when you jump and move at a gruelling pace making every jump seem like a leap of faith. And not to mention, if you miss a jump and fall a “level.” you die using up one of the very few lives that you have.

Castle Kong is painfully difficult with each run starting with three lives, and a single continue once you run out of lives its back to the start. This makes it almost impossible to progress to some of the later levels, especially with how unfair some of the enemy AI is. Most of my deaths felt incredibly cheap. I never felt challenged by the game; I just felt like everything was out to get me, and one wrong move would leave me trapped. And one miss-timed jump would end the run. To add to the annoyance of having to start the whole game over after running out of lives, the game takes about 15 seconds to go from death to playing again. Ultimately instead, the felling difficult or challenge castle kong is just annoying and overly punishing. 

The level design in Caste Kong is a lot more creative than the gameplay mechanics; however, tasking you to dodge arrows and cut down chandlers to progress gives some diversity to the gameplay rather than the classic climb the tower and gain score. However, the game does become stale after you run through the first few levels over and over. So you can have another go at one jump that took all your life’s the first time around. 

Stylistically the game does look great using a classic 8bit art style with bright, vibrant colours that pop wonderfully of the screen. Most of the character design is pretty standard but shout of to the king for looking particularly like Lord Farquad and making him even more detestable. However, my desire to save the princess and take out the king does not help me overcome painfully slow movement.

Overall, Castle Kong tries to recapture the original Donkey Kong’s original feel and succeed in doing that but maybe slightly too well, leaving the game to feel very slow.  Castle Kong is also frustratingly difficult, and the long respawn times make the temptation of switching over to something out very appealing.

Fallen Legion: Revenants is an unusual game. When the rest of the gaming industry said “We think games should work like *this*”, Fallen Legion: Revenants looked up from its finger painting of a ghost witch and said, “Nah, I’m good”. Oftentimes when a developer takes this stance and sets off perpendicular from the deep worn tracks of gaming conventions, we end up with some stunning and revolutionary games. I’m thinking of games like Watch Dogs Legion with its immersive open world, Red Faction: Guerrilla with its building deformation/destruction and basically anything by Hideo Kojima. However, in this hall of innovators, with great games adorning every wall, standing proud like portraits, Fallen Legion: Revenants has shown up to ask for a spot for its aforementioned finger painting and, while it does have some artistic merit, it doesn’t hold a candle up to anything in the Kojima Wing (which is just as well considering the metaphorical fire hazard of a metaphorical candle in a metaphorical building full of metaphorical paintings).

The game is a sort of side-scrolling knight-them-up where you play as Rowena, a magic ghost lady and three Exemplars (fighty people) who are under her control. You’re trying to track down Rowena’s son by fighting your way to his location through a plague-ridden world, with the plague in question turning mankind into mutated creatures that you’re assured it’s morally acceptable for you to decimate your way through to achieve your own ends. You also spend brief sections of the game playing as Lucien, a politician in the human safe-haven of Welkin Castle where you use social skills to uncover intel to pass to Rowena to aid her search.

One way the game diverts from mainstream gaming is having no time whatsoever for people who haven’t played the previous entry in the series, starting off with no explanation to what is going on or who anyone is. I picked most of the above paragraph up from the game’s website and some in-game dialogue. Honestly, I kind of dig this approach to writing a game’s plot. There’s something there for people who’ve played the previous games and want to follow the story but also there isn’t any real need to understand what’s going on to play the game. Some great games have zero plot at all and focus 100% on the gameplay. I’m thinking of Tetris, Plants vs Zombies, Doom (wait, Doom has a story!?). I’m okay with Fallen Legion: Revenants joining the ranks of those games and I wish more games would do away with their plots if they actively stand in the way of the gameplay (I’m looking at you, Sakura Wars, with your 90-minute opening cutscene).

However, the main way Fallen Legion: Revenants strays from the tracks laid by the rest of the video game industry is in the combat. It’s almost turn-based but not quite. Each one of your four core characters is assigned a face button which causes them to attack (or in Rowena’s case, use magic spells to heal the Exemplars or manipulate the enemies in some way). You can also add in a press of a trigger or bumper to change the type of attack done. Each attack by the Exemplars uses Action Points and each Exemplar has their own pool of Action Points which slowly refill over time (you can do about three attacks before you’re out of AP and need to wait for it to recharge). I imagine you’re supposed to manage which Exemplar is attacking at a particular time so you don’t end up waiting for all of their Action Points to come back, but I never saw the point in doing that, as the timing of attacks doesn’t do anything, so you might as well dish out as much damage as quickly as you can. This leaves the combat feeling quite frustrating as you’re constantly doing nothing while you wait for the ability to attack again. The best comparison I can think of is if VATS in a Fallout game was the only way you could interact with the game. No movement and no manual aiming, just fire until you run out of AP, wait for the AP to come back while the enemies continue to attack, fire until you run out of AP again. I think with a bit more to the combat, balancing your AP usage against something else, this would’ve been a really interesting combat system but, as it is, I don’t think it’ll be catching on and showing up in any mainstream games.

For me, Fallen Legion: Revenants is one of those restaurants that does fancy and experimental food and that has highly mixed reviews on TripAdvisor. Maybe the apple crumble flavoured pasta and peanut butter salad are doing something interesting, but by the time you finish you’re still hungry and just want some proper food so you stop by a Five Guys on the way home. It was certainly an experience. There’s some interesting stuff going on in there somewhere and I’m sure some people will get a lot out of it, but if you’re expecting to draw parallels to a game you’ve played before, you’re going to end up disappointed.

If Bandai Namco hadn’t copyrighted the use of minigames in loading screens, Jade’s Ascension, a twin-stick local co-op arcade shooter would feel right at home existing as a momentary diversion within a complete game.

Clearing floors of enemies while making your way up a tower with Chinese-inspired music and visuals might have you making comparisons to Bruce Lee’s The Game of Death, but cinematic and epic this game is not, with every aspect lacking in some form.

With a choice of 5 different characters, you stand in a square room defeating a random assortment of characters with projectiles from your hands or weapon – Harry Potter or Goku-esque, and you can run side to side while aiming with your twin sticks. Defeating adversaries drops coins that you can use for upgrades and your health replenishes with every level passed. ‘Simple is best’ might be the mantra of many successful arcade games, but Spanish developer Papas Con Mojo Games, while taking this to heart, probably should have focused more on the finer details of the title’s core gameplay loop, the end result feeling functional but dull. 

Making this process especially tedious is the lack of sound effects from your attacks and lack of feedback from hits taken from the enemy. Your weapon sounds like a hairdryer on death’s door, barely registering at all and you’d have no idea your health was depleting if not for your health meter. Adding further to frustrations are the equally puzzling enemies, the first of which is a bird that emits a forcefield blocking your attacks but cannot attack you in any way, meaning you can run around like a headless chicken hairdryer in-hand with a bunch of seemingly friendly birds. 

Upgrades are made available every few completed floors, which make the gameplay even easier, but are unable to reverse the inane nature of it. In fact, defeating enemies is less enjoyable than watching yourself be defeated as you can dispatch entire floors by standing in the corner of the room and aiming to the center of it, barely moving your joystick.  

Puzzlingly there’s a tutorial lasting a couple of paragraphs, but it omits to explain the few challenges available in the game, which is quite bold as the bland conceit will hardly encourage curiosity among the few that purchase it. So, despite it not being explained, the ability to ascend fire, tree, water and earth towers with a simple boss in each does exist and represents the main point of the game. The levels differ, but the challenge doesn’t, with the player still able to kill 90% of the enemies from the corner of the room as most of the residents run around aimlessly as if they are programmed to seem like they are attacking the other players in the co-op mode. Even those that do attack you directly can be defeated this way. Unfortunately, only one portal exists to change the tower you wish to climb, and the tower on offer is random, so you are forced to continue up your current tower in the hopes of finding the one you want. The achievements are also the only clue about which you have left to get through.

You could argue that this game’s 4 players local co-op mode is where the fun is had, but I’m not sure that you’d want to willingly force this experience on others unless it’s as shared suffering of sorts. Perhaps the only feature not lacking in quality are the character and enemy designs whose smooth animation and colorful presentation look like they have been lifted from a show on Cartoon Network.

Despite Jade’s Ascension loading and running without issue, this cannot be considered a finished product, offering so little in content or fun, ultimately feeling like a free mobile game that somehow made it to consoles with a price tag slapped on it. Realistically the only people that should consider the purchase are platinum trophy hunters and children as it’s short and simple enough for both. For everyone else – this should be avoided at all costs.