Recent reviews by IronBear

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is well worth it's asking price of $17.

I was able to complete the game 100% in around 11 hours, and it was a blast all around. Do be warned, though: those expecting a goofier Crazy Taxi experience can get a little of that, but this game has a surprising emphasis on platforming. You'll be abusing speed bursts on ramps to get where you're intended to go, and sometimes it feels where you're not intended to (I got a gear in the sky intended for using a propeller to access with some ramp cheese and precise backflips).

You can really zoom when you want to, and the game lends itself well to speedrunning. It also has a timer you can enable in the options if you're into that, as well as some time trial modes I didn't try out. The presentation tried to emulate a PS1 experience but with all the modern conveniences there that keep it from feeling genuine, not that it's a bad thing. The music was excellently done, mostly focusing on chiptune mixes and some eurobeat elements, though there are some orchestral themes here and there as well. There are also a lot of gags and crude humor that may or may not land for you, but it got some grins out of me.

Again, if you're here for Crazy Taxi, the game likes to present itself with a handful of challenges like that, but for the most part, expect a 3D platformer with driving physics.

I've never played Tribes: Ascend, but I'd imagine this is like that but in a smaller-scale roguelike package.

Roboquest is a movement-heavy roguelite FPS. If you don't know what roguelite means at this point, it's a game focused on short-term repeatable campaigns, using semi-randomly generated environments and featuring perks and loot unique to each run. This game has meta-progression, meaning your base moveset and stats will improve based on your time investment and exploration, making later runs easier. Expect a lot of movement in the moment-to-moment gameplay here (also there's goomba-stomping). At $25 USD, this game is worth every penny.

Roboquest is a relatively simple game: you run, you gun, you jump, you fly, you grapple, all while heading towards the end of the level or to the next boss. You will find a variety of guns to fit different playstyles, and also unlock different robots to play as with their own unique passives, actives, and playstyles. Despite environments being semi-random, there are enough cool things to find and unlock that you'll be having fun while unlocking everything the game has to offer.

I would say the main draw is the sheer variety in your moveset once you unlock all of the gear available in the game. Gear pieces will permanently unlock different moves and passives that will speed up the gameplay and make it more deep. You've got chargeable super jumps, airbone-to-ground slams, grappling hooks, buffs to move speed after grinding, all adding more options to navigate levels as quickly as possible.

Destroying all enemies and moving as quickly as possible is heavily incentivized throughout your playthroughs. On top of a level up system being in play to reward you perks for enough enemy kills, your end of level rank will reward you with cores immediately useful in your current playthrough as well as wrenches used for meta-progression. Your rank is determined by EXP gain (enemies killed) and time.

Guns in this game feel good. You've got your clip/mag based weapons that require reloads as well as energy based weapons that require cooldowns. You'll find yourself deciding between opting for crit shots, exploiting one of the three elements in the game, covering the level with explosives, or just opting for as many bullets as possible. Some weapons can lean towards the more niche use-cases, but it's all in good fun and you can always carry two weapons, after all. One of the features I love to see in games like this are mechanics that reload inactive guns while they're in your pocket for long enough. Each playable robot has their own strengths and weaknesses that will push you towards specific playstyles and are varied enough so you can figure out your favorites to use.

This game has online co-op for two total players at a time. It's pretty well balanced, and is great to play through with a friend. No egregious scaling issues, and no cheesing fights with revives thanks to the game's strict but fair revive system (a fallen bot can auto-revive after a full minute or be helped up by the other player, but will always take half of the remaining player's health to do so).

This game had a few updates after the fact that I'll pretend is my excuse for not having posted a review for this long after playing it. A large variety of new weapons were added, some new NPCs, along with a very unique playable character that doesn't function like the other bots in the game. Additionally, There is an endless mode added for those who want to see how overpowered they can get their run. Overall, very good updates. As of the time of writing, I don't know if they have plans to develop any more major updates for the game, though they have announced a VR version of the game currently in development.

Overall, I can't recommend this game enough. It's a blast to play, great to play in short bursts but addicting enough to keep you around for long sessions. Even after having unlocked everything and gotten all achievements, every once in a while I just want to jump in and have fun.

This game is for everyone who want to fulfill the "ora ora ora" fantasy.

Fight Knight is half dungeon crawler, half... puzzle fighter? Maybe half Punch-Out. I haven't played anything like this game before. It's a unique game that knows how to deliver style and substance, and one glance should be all it takes for you to figure out if you like the kind of style this game will deliver. Having played it once, if I could know the experience gained in this playthrough before purchase, I'd say it's worth even the base price, but that's just me. Know before buying that this game is pretty niche, but for someone who's looking for a new and well crafted experience, this game is worth exploring.

The visuals in this game are obviously very striking. Each environment has a color palette it'll stick to, using little more than 2 or 3 colors at a time (not including black) and gradients of those colors. It has a real retro feel, but the only thing I can think to compare it to is like a Visual Boy if it was capable of more than just red coloring. All environments are rendered in 3D, but all enemies, NPCs, projectiles, pretty much anything but the environment are 2D sprites. These sprites have a hand drawn feel and look put through a grain filter that gives me CRT vibes without the token CRT lines some games like to shove in your face to feel retro. Overall, I'm a big fan of how the game looks, but be wary of headaches and motion sickness. The colors by default are pretty saturated, and the games camera does a lot of bobbing and weaving for dramatic effect. Thankfully, this game has a ton of options to mitigate this: if anything seems like it will cause you issues, explore the options and adjust things as needed.

Let's talk about the dungeon crawler half. Exploration is grid based. If you've ever played a Pokemon game before X/Y, you know what you're dealing with: each movement is one square at a time, and you're going to be moving through maze-like environments in a first-person perspective. Tank controls: left and right turn your character, up and down move forward and back. There are button mappings for strafing left and right (left/right bumper on controller). If we want to continue the Pokemon comparison, be prepared for the kinds of puzzles you'd find there: block puzzles, avoiding line-of-sight (though thankfully not stealth), sliding ice stuff, the works. However, let's be honest, this half of the game isn't what you're here for. Dungeon exploration is done competently, and the environments are visually appealing enough to get you by, breaking up the combat with trash mobs to keep combat from getting stale.

Now, the fighting, the main attraction. Moving through the dungeon will trigger random encounters (other than bosses of course). Battles are also grid-based and take place in corridors two squares wide. Two monsters can fit side-by-side up front, and will prevent anything behind them from moving forward and you from moving past them until they're dealt with. Some monsters take advantage of this with ranged attacks and camp out in the backlines. The Fight Knight gets a surprisingly large variety of moves and the game makes sure to give you reason to learn them as you progress. You got your side-swipes, uppercuts, charged punches, and rapid-fire punches, to name a few. You can also block to reduce damage, or perfectly time your block to parry enemy attacks, though this is not always the optimal solution. You'll learn pretty early on that sometimes you just have to bob and weave instead of trying to face-tank everything. On top of the basics, you've also got special moves that take meter to perform, and will have minigame button combos to perform. Encounters with trash mobs are all about learning what each enemy is capable of, how to counter them, and how to juggle a bunch of different problems at once, choosing what's worth obliterating with a special move right away. Bosses are a whole different beast, and feel more traditionally Punch-Out-like. Expect high energy encounters that test your reflexes and pattern recognition in a short timeframe. Bosses are the highlight of combat for me.

As for plot and setting, the game does a decent job at having a few interesting storylines for NPCs throughout the game. The designs are charming, and everything that talks in the game has a Banjo-Kazooie-esque mishmash of mumbles unique to each character. A lot of flavor is available on each enemy if you're willing to give up parts for it (or look them up online after the fact, as I did). The main story does a good job of keeping the mystery of who exactly you are supposed to be and what your goals are, and the payoff at the end is satisfying enough.

Other things worth mentioning are potions as the only consumable resource in the game. Use monster parts to unlock them, and you're free to as many as you can carry every time you go back to town. Additionally, you can unlock armors which give you different stats and movesets for experimentation (I used the first unlockable armor for the majority of the game for its glass cannon playstyle). You can find recipes to unlock new special moves from the chef on the ship, which also require monster parts. There was only one occasion where I ever needed to grind monster parts for something, and it wasn't really that bad, though I do get the idea that certain enemies are more likely to be encountered on certain tiles of the map than others.

Overall, I really like Fight Knight. I'm considering playing through the game again, which is kind of rare for most games I play that aren't designed to run forever. I will say that the final boss left enough of an impression to me to want to fight him again. Team Sorcerobe, if you are reading this, my only complaint is that you can't refight the bosses any time you want. A mode where you get to replay bosses (NOT explicitly a boss rush) would be a big win. For those playing, if you want to avoid my situation, consider copying your file to another slot before boss encounters in case you want to replay them without going through the whole game again. Beating the game will NOT give you a prompt on if you want to proceed to new game plus and will just immediately boot your file to new game plus. Other than that, I have no complaints. I wish anyone picking up this game a fun experience.

I'll be keeping it short for this one.

Everybody already knows Sonic Adventure 2 if you haven't been living under a rock. Decades old at this point, practically a classic. If you have any interest in Sonic at all and haven't already played this game, give it a go.

This game has some jank that modern games just don't have any more. You could get a game by with a lot of jank as long as the style is cool, as this game demonstrates. I think Sonic Adventure 1 is better, but 2 is still great and innovated a lot with 3D Sonic gameplay. Expect mech stages to get old, but Sonic/Shadow stages are fun. Knuckles stages are there.

This game innovated on the Chao Garden introduced in Sonic Adventure 1. Diehard fans will tell you that the Chao Garden was one of the main selling points of the game, and I would've argued otherwise but even after so damn long and on a mission to just beat the game 100% ASAP, I still put more hours into the Chao Garden than I expected to. It's stupid, and it's fun. If SEGA ever moved to make a standalone game around these things there would be some money to be had, but they never did.

If you made it to this game after seeing the 3rd Sonic movie, this is the origin of Shadow the Hedgehog. Enjoy his stereotypical edge.

Reconsider planning to go into this game dry. This game is vastly improved with mods using the SAModManager. Consider looking up a video for suggestions on what to implement. At the very least, enable the code to multiply Chao stat gains if you plan to get in, get out of this experience.

This game had some good 3D platformer bones, but it's got some unfortunate caveats that mean I can't really recommend this game.

Blue Fire is, as stated above, a 3D platformer. It has some combat, but really, I wish it didn't. I was having a nice time with it at first, but began feeling dragged down as the experience continued into lategame. I played this game for almost 8 hours, got 99% completion according to the game, but all achievements. I was given a prompt that I'd unlocked some DLC content once I beat the game, but seeing as there wasn't any option on the menu for it, and loading back into the game didn't give me any directions to it, I decided to end my playthrough there as I didn't want to scramble around the map with no clue where to look.

First, let's talk about the bones I was talking about. As a 3D platformer, this game does an OK job. Running and jumping around feels alright, and as the game continues on, you unlock more moves akin to a Metroidvania. At endgame, you can navigate around maps very quickly, with the only real obstacle being if you need to go anywhere that's too vertical. You've got walljumps, double jumps, airdashes, and even double all of those things with the right loadout. There are sections of the game called Voids that are isolated platforming challenges where this game's platforming shines.

However, that's where some of the level design starts to cause issues. Those isolated challenges may be great, but overall level design of the world is not. Sure, there are a couple of small bits at the beginning that may make you feel as if you are being challenged, but most areas as you go on just kind of become slogs that you constantly dash through. Things got a bit better once I unlocked sprinting (separate from a burst dash), but going back and forth through these places to try to find things got pretty old, especially the first city you get to. Also, there is no map to speak of in this game. If you have a poor memory, may god have mercy on you. I would say my memory worked just fine but I was still annoyed trying to remember where key items or quests were that I had to backtrack for.

I offhandedly mentioned combat and that I wish it wasn't in the game. Early on, combat works OK. You have a basic 3 hit combo with an air combo to match. You get a spell for long range, a spin attack later on, and a shield to block and parry. Here's the problem with each:

The spell costs mana to use and may as well be a wet fart for all it does. Very early into the game you can kill some rats with it, and maybe some airborne enemies if you use a few casts, but it's very mana hungry and can't do nearly as much damage as your sword can. You don't use mana for much and you can refill it with restoratives, but using a recovery item just for the spell feels dumb. Also, the spell instantly casts on anything in range to target, but only those targets, no sniping from a distance.

The spin attack is introduced as both an attack and a navigation tool, as it can send you upwards as a primitive double jump, and that's how it's intended at first. It does more damage than a normal swing as well, so sometimes it might've been useful in combat, but no matter if you use it in the ground or midair, it will always send you up into the air. For ground enemies, you can't follow up. For midair enemies, you get sent too high up and your air combo will drop. Spin attack is just unfortunate if you actually intend to use it as an attack.

As for the shield, obviously it can block, and it does a decent job at that: later on, just blocking an attack is probably a better use of your mana than the projectile spell. You can also parry with the shield: it works Smash Ultimate style, drop the shield as you get hit to enter parry state and do massive damage on the next attack. Honestly, I parried easier before I was told this is how I parry, and once I tried to use it as described, I barely got it to function, and that's also because of the enemies in the game.

You've got your ground based enemies and your aerial enemies. The ground based enemies are fine early on, but later, the most infuriating thing about fighting guys with swords is that all of them have a thrust attack with no windup and a lingering hitbox. Want to parry? I never got it to work for how quickly they pull it out. Want to dodge and follow up? Great, you dodged, he's obviously gone a moved through his follow up, but you dash up to him afterwards and his hitbox was still active, so you take damage either way. It's interactions like this that just made me avoid combat later on other than bosses, and the bosses have difficulty going all over the place as well, but I won't comment on it. As for airborne enemies, you're supposed to be able to target and dash right to them, but the dash doesn't quite get the distance right, and if you manage to get in their face, you'll be lucky if you actually manage to pull off a full midair combo. Also, later on these guys get kind of spongey, so later on I just opted to avoid combat with anything. Special mention goes to the worm in the magma area that constantly snipes at you and is practically invincible, as it will retreat when you get within range of doing anything until you're back out of range.

Those were the major nitpicks, but I'll also mention the spirit system. Effectively, they're badges from things you might know about like Hat in Time, Hollow Knight, or Paper Mario perhaps if you forget about the RPG aspect. You can unlock more slots from an NPC using the currency you gain in Voids, but the game doesn't explicitly point that out and I thought it was the currency you get from enemies at first. However, over half of them are for movement and may seem cool at first but didn't end up being anything special. Do another dash in midair on a cooldown, do another jump in midair on a cooldown, go higher with your spin attack, etc... These things at first made me feel like I was flexing my platforming power by getting places that weren't intended, but after doing it for so long, I'm pretty sure you're intended to use a lot of these. After a while, it began to feel less like I was going through a curated level in the overworld and more like some vague semblance of a world was built to just jump through with all these powers. Felt less personal. I would've preferred maybe if these were taken out and replaced with a more traditional powerup progression.

Overall, I considered giving this game a positive review, but decided otherwise as I went through the last couple of hours of gameplay. I just wanted to get it over with, and a game shouldn't make you feel that way. This game's full price is $20 USD. I'm sure I got it on a discount a while back, and at the time of writing, it's -75% for $5 USD. If you're curious about the game, I'd say it's worth $15, but you can probably manage to get it for lower.

Before getting into anything else, do not consider buying this game at full price ($40 USD). It goes on sale for up to -75% off regularly, and to get ahead of the review a bit, I do not consider this game worth any more than that discounted price of $10 USD.

The Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series is a collection of the Klonoa 2D platformer duology. While I'm aware there exists at least one more game in the Klonoa series (I think it's an action RPG of sorts for the Gameboy Advance released only in Japan), this collection will give you the definitive Klonoa experience.

And that experience sucks.

As someone who didn't grow up with these games, the Klonoa games struck me as some sort of cult classic sleeper hit from the PS1/Dreamcast era. Klonoa as a character has that 90s Sonic-mascot appeal, and 2D platformers seemed hard to screw up, but these games have proven that something as simple as a 2D platformer can indeed be botched.

I do have some positive things to say about the duology, but lets get my biggest gripes out of the way: stiff controls. Klonoa is a relatively simple game that could be played with two buttons and a D-Pad. Your main gameplay is walking through levels, grabbing enemies, then flinging those enemies as projectiles or using them as fuel for a double jump. There is an extra level at the end of the first game that proves that this can be pulled off well, but in the rest of the game, camera angles and level design can get in your way. Your "grab" move is extremely short range, and indicated by an animation with very little visual feedback. Due to the short hitbox on this move, enemies walking up or down hills can be frustrating to grab, and for some of the midair precision platforming the game demands of you, the camera on levels can make it very hard to time your grabs, which can be a nightmare. On top of those issues, your walk speed is very slow. I wouldn't count this as too much of a negative if not for your midair hover move, which keeps you in the air for an extremely short time while cutting your move speed in half; if you were aiming for a moving platform below, this can mean that platform drifts out of your reach because you opted for safety. Also, the hover doesn't function on some invisible "resource bar", so to speak. Once you initiate a hover, of which you are only allowed one before hitting the ground, that's it. If you happen to cancel out of the hover accidentally, that is also it. There were many times you might tap the hover button in a panic and immediately waste that resource, and platforming in this game is tight enough at times for that to be an issue.

I played Klonoa 1 first, followed almost immediately by Klonoa 2. These games are not long, and I completed both in a little over 10 hours total, with all achievements. After all was said and done, I think Klonoa 1 is the better game than Klonoa 2 here. You may have noticed above I didn't say which of the two games had the above problems, and that's because they both control exactly the same, warts and all.

Klonoa 1 had a better overall presentation. The characters are better designed, the levels are colorful, and the music, while not having anything that'll get stuck in your head, is pleasant and appropriate. There is some weirdness to some of the character models at time, but you can write it off easily enough. In both games, cutscenes are voiced with a unique gibberish, and in Klonoa 1, those voices are practically bitcrushed, which may sound bad, but it may actually be the original sound files from the original game. I give positive points for this, as it helps this game feel more legit. I have no idea if it is the original audio though. Boss fights in Klonoa 1 are better designed and more fun for the most part. My major complaints with this game (other than the controls) is some of the level design. Klonoa 1 and 2 feature a 2.5D level structure, where you move alongside a plane through the level and can interact with the foreground and background to an extent, sometimes following different paths winding through the levels depending on where you land. Enemies respawn, and a problem that Klonoa 1 mostly experiences is that much of the time, enemies can hop onto your plane of existence without warning, causing damage that seems somewhat unfair. Also, I will never forgive the worst level of the first game: a temple that cycles between normal day, and night where enemies are invincible, you're stalked by a ghost constantly, and some platforms are made available. It's relatively late into the first game but really dragged down the entire experience for me, it was that bad.

Klonoa 2 is more of the first game, but the overall design of the game felt like it was leaning too far into a Sonic-like aesthetic, featuring many more characters and much more dialogue, which is not a good thing. The plot tries to come to the forefront here, but the first game did it right in not trying to bog you down too much with intercharacter relationships and such. The first game had speech on autoplay, with a button to either skip or speed the dialogue forward at 5x speed. The second game features the buttons again, but now for some reason you have to hit a button to progress speech most of the time, so you have to choose between sitting through agonizingly slow speech, or speeding through it and losing some context. The levels don't experience the problem of enemies popping into your plane abruptly as much and are thankfully better telegraphed. Unfortunately, that's probably as much praise as I can give the level design. The game features a new type of level where you're on a snowboard, which can end up as a 2D autoscroller or a 3D half-pipe kind of stage. When you're trying to go for 100%, autoscrollers of any sort are usually the bane of your existence, and there is no exception here. All other levels that are the same old 2D platforming aren't anything special. At least the first game had it feel somewhat original, and the world felt complete, but here you're heading through some more traditional video game biomes that can feel uninspired, even if some might argue they bring variety.

That's most of what I have to say about the games, but another point I wanted to bring up is the existence of a Klonoa 1 remake on the Nintendo Wii. I had to come back to edit this after some research, but it appears a lot of that game's improvements to the original were reused here, though it's notable that this collection doesn't give the option to use his updated model from the Wii version, nor does it give the option to have everyone speak in an actual language. It would've been an interesting addition, at least, even if you're a traditionalist.

Overall, I'm sure Klonoa has its defenders. It's not the worst experience you'll ever have playing a 2D platformer, and it may even have some things you won't see anywhere else, but I can tell you for sure that those things won't make up for the mediocre experience you'll have at every other moment of gameplay. Only indulge in these games if you have a morbid curiosity that can't be cured by looking up footage online, if you're gripping the nostalgia goggles hard, or if you can get it on sale for cheap. Especially the last one. Please don't pay full price, for god's sake.

This is how you remember the old 3D platformers, idealized.

The Big Catch: Tacklebox is a demo for base game The Big Catch, which as of this writing is currently unreleased. It took me a while before deciding to review this game, but I couldn't resist after having this game on my mind since I fully completed the demo at the end of November. Tacklebox may be a demo, but I would argue that it could stand on its own as a game with a price tag (I'd say $20 USD max, $10 USD min).

This game is a 3D platformer with an emphasis on momentum-based movement. Expect wall jumps, climbing, cliff-hanging, swinging, and a number of other toys and scenarios to learn to use and abuse momentum to your benefit. The artstyle is evocative of the Sega Dreamcast era, with polygonal character models and cel shading, and color can be surprisingly varied as you search the desert ruins. Character animations are expressive and polished to a modern standard despite the nostalgic angle of the art. The music has some very catchy entries, though I'm sad to say that you'll be hearing the "Ruins" theme most often, a piece featuring a lot of bells that plays at the majority of locations. The piece is meant to evoke some mystique, but doesn't have much of a melody and wears out its welcome after hearing it for 30 minutes or so. Nevertheless, tracks like the Desert theme, Springer, and Garden Tower pick up the slack and are a joy to hear for the limited time you'll experience theme.

This game takes place in a sandbox (hence the name Tacklebox) where you are free to go anywhere you'd like in the demo area, with the open-ended mission of collecting tokens and fish (which are traded in for more tokens). Despite the game's fishing theme, actual fishing mechanics that you would expect from other games are at a minimum, the only function resembling traditional fishing being snagging a hook-like fruit, dipping it in the water near a fish, then hitting a button to yank the fish out and initiate a comical chase against said fish as it sprouts legs and sprints away. The amount of times the above fishing mechanic comes into play can probably be counted using the fingers on one hand, maybe pulling out the second hand if my memory fails me, but many of the fish encountered are already set on land, eager to sprint away at the sight of you on their predetermined pathing like a Spyro egg thief.

The setting of Tacklebox takes place on a desert plateau meant as some sort of rite-of-passage for the player character. Some may argue the scale is overblown, as points of interest are scattered here and there throughout the desert, but desert exploration consists of surfing at high speed propelled by critters you can hook onto. This travel can feel evocative of games such as The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, accented by the wonderful travel song that plays along the way, but where Wind Waker travel felt like you just set and forget, Tacklebox can feel much more engaging, with your character being dragged along to and fro as you time boosts to keep a quick pace. Not to mention, you can abuse the speed coming off of these surfs, bunny-hopping to keep momentum and playing into the freedom of movement this game is built on (this is even expected in one particular area).

Completionists can have their fill with this game. There are a finite amount of tokens and fish to be found in the game, and finding all of them gives you a final challenge as a test of your experience up to that point. Having such a goal can be pretty motivating, though I'll warn that the game will expect a pretty thorough mastery over its movement before it'll let you get that far. It took me a little over 7 hours for 100% completion, though I had to do some backtracking as I didn't realize what 100% completion entailed. Those unwilling to put in the effort shouldn't be discouraged, though. The actual game once released likely won't have strict requirements to reach a definitive end, and this is a demo, a FREE one. If you're the type to enjoy exploration for exploration's sake, feel free to get your feet wet here and have some fun.

In short, Tacklebox is amazing, and it's just a demo. I'm still trying to chase the high felt in this demo with other game experiences, and I haven't found a match yet. I am eagerly anticipating the official release sometime in 2025 (I don't know any specific release date, if it exists) as it will probably be a game of the year candidate for me personally. If you like 3D platformers at all, download the demo and give it a try.

NOTE FOR COMPLETIONISTS: a couple of things I would've liked to have known for sure going in:

- Token drops from enemies are permanently collected, meaning required for 100%.
- The compass always points north, but the fish engraving on the spine glows for nearby fish, and the orb glows for nearby tokens.
- Wall-jumps between walls that are too far apart require specific tech if there's a third wall in the back: wall-jump into wall-run on the back wall, repeat until you're high enough. It can feel awkward but you get used to it.

The Knight Witch is a nice twin-stick shooting Metroidvania. Expect bullet hell elements. Not too long, took me around 11 hours to 100% clear with all achievements.

This game controls fairly well, though there is some slight awkwardness always when games call for precision firing using control sticks/controllers. Unfortunately a mouse and keyboard control scheme, while sounding better on paper, ends up being more awkward than a controller in comparison as the camera can pan mid-fight causing a loss of precision that feels worse than controller in comparison. The game has an auto-aim mechanic that fires on the closest enemy when firing without designating a direction, at the cost of a slight DPS loss. My advice would be try to ignore your instinct to maximize damage: many of the smaller enemy types will go down faster with auto-aim, save aiming for bigger or more dangerous targets and focus on dodging.

The gameplay is typical twin-stick, move with left stick, aim with right. My experience with difficulty was that it was easy, then got appropriately challenging, just enough to make me wish I had a dodge, and then hey, there's the dodge move (it's the first major ability you unlock). After that things got slightly easier, before the game had an appropriate curve as the game went on. Combat is supplemented by a deck-building system, which I usually don't care for, but thankfully doesn't get too complex. You build a deck of a few cards, the size of which goes up as you increase the amount of mana you can spend to play cards. Cards can be one-time use attacks, defensive moves, summons, and weapons with limited duration. You get mana by hitting enemies (percent chance on hit to drop mana) and killing them.

The game's artstyle felt a little awkward when I was first getting into it, but it grew on me. Environments are particularly well drawn, and the character designs are cute for the most part. If I had any specific complaints, any time an NPC walks on-screen, it looks a bit jank, but depending on how you feel about the kind of thing, some people could find that charming too. Rayne (the player character) was given a lot of attention to her flight animation and it feels cool even if you aren't moving particularly fast.

The game's sound direction is solid. Sound effects felt satisfying, and the whole game aims for a more folksy music style on the whole, with more intense rock sections whenever you get into combat. I was a particular fan of the instrument shift into more industrial kinds of instruments in the water level while underwater. The game even capped off with a vocal version of the main theme of the game that was pretty nice. In my personal opinion, though, nothing particularly catchy that you would want to listen to outside of the game. Still, the game is complemented well in moment to moment gameplay by its soundtrack.

The story of this game was pretty good. No particular roller coaster moments or anything, but it did have some nice twists or two, some you'll probably see coming, and maybe some you won't. There's some nice backstory hidden in notes around the world that are unfortunately hard to find. I won't go into detail any more than that: the story isn't anything amazing, but it has its interesting points and at the very least shouldn't feel detrimental to the experience.

In conclusion, I'd say the Knight Witch is well worth the asking price, especially if you're a fan of twin-stick shooters and bullet hell. If you're not a fan of the genre, this game goes on sale pretty low (it's -80% off at the time of writing), so maybe consider giving it a try. It's a nice little romp to experience over the course of a week or so.

P.S.: I'll drop a couple of cheats here that I felt could've worked just as well as some options to toggle on and off by default.

Glass Rayne/One-HP Mode (useful if you're aiming to complete ambushes without getting hit): Blue-0, Green-1, Yellow-2, Purple-3
Show Damage Numbers (if you like that kind of thing): Purple-3, Yellow-2, Green-1, Blue-0

This game presents itself charmingly at first glance, with a cozy world and artstyle, simple cooking, and a dash of Hades top-down brawling. Don't let it sucker you in. I ended up playing 50 hours due to sunk-cost fallacy, and once I saw what the last challenge in the game was, I immediately said goodbye to my attempt to get all achievements in this game. I feel entirely cheated.

Why do I feel so cheated? That's because this game is 90% grinding. In the early game, you're grinding for money as you're scrambling to get practically mandatory upgrades for your inventory and restaurant, alongside some resources out in the field. Once you get midway through and unlock some 2* and 3* recipes, the grind then becomes mainly for field resources, and grinding it feels awful. You will require tons and tons of wood and stone, and they're littered everywhere on the map. You will spend almost twice as much time mashing combos on stationary rocks and trees than you will actually fighting things. And that's arguably less annoying than the combat in this game.

If you've played Hades before (and Hades will be brought up often here), you know what you're dealing with, but simplified: an attack combo for each weapon, a dash attack, a special move (single charge), isometric perspective with waves of enemies coming at you. However, where this game fails is giving anything actually interesting to combat, and falling into annoying pitfalls that Hades avoids, sometimes literally. You are required to dash across gorges and traps constantly, but gorges are not just to break up the map, you can fall into them. You have to keep that in mind constantly while dealing with enemy hordes, which gets very tiring. You also cannot dash through walls, which duh, that complaint is only because Hades lets you do it, but in this game it's especially bad as this game LOVES to put enemies in fenced off portions of the room with small entry points, fences which enemies can fire through but you can't, by the way.

3 Melee weapon types with 2 unique special attacks each, 3 ranged weapon types, so in total there are barely any options to tackle enemies. You'll have to hope you get some kind of viable status to chew through the waves upon waves of trash they throw at you (I used Sour/Electric plates for practically the entire game). Swords are fast but feel like wet noodles, spears are decent, but greatswords are so painfully slow that you'll find yourself eating melee hits constantly if you actually try to use them in combat, but they're the best at breaking the environment for resources, which is annoying that this is enough of an upside to actually consider using one for.

Equipment progression is awful. With all of my resources being eaten up trying to level up the restaurant, I was constantly too dry to upgrade my equipment often. However, after sinking resources into it, I found that upgrading your equipment practically does nothing. The damage difference is so negligible that you're better off just hoping for better modifiers on your weapons instead. Stick with Sour/Electric for mobs, and Toasty/Fire + Bitter/Poison for bosses. Salty/Pushback is interesting on spears when tied to their dash attack and buffed by instant damage during knockback, but Sweet/Debuff, Umami/Shield, and Chilled/Frozen are almost entirely useless.

The actual restaurant portion of the game is completely fine once you reach midgame, but getting to midgame is annoying due to the aforementioned constant resource shortage. Managing cooldowns on your cookstations and trying to remember which special customers want their food brought to them (most customers claim their food automatically) was engaging and actually fun. Decorating the restaurant is OK, but really barebones and it sucks that you can't move counter positions or the entrance queue. Once I found out that the last challenge was for you to have to go scrounge an arena for resources while managing cooking uptimes, I immediately quit the game for good. The idea of having to do more combat while having to actively think about what resources to get (during restaurant phase you normally don't have to manage your ingredients) was too much to bear.

Please, avoid this game. If you want a game with combat that's 10x better, go play Hades instead. Unfortunately I can't really recommend anything for someone who's here for the restaurant portion, but I guarantee you there's a game out there that does it better.

Edit: Forgot some more things that suck.

- No quicksaves. You only save at the end of the day. Dungeon runs can take 30+ minutes if you're trying to max your inventory, so this sucks. Also forget about starting up a day, taking care of small tasks, then quicksaving so you don't forget things before your next dungeon/restaurant day.

- Possible memory leak that affects performance. The longer you play, the choppier the graphics get. You have to close and relaunch the game between days for the best experience.

- Upgrading a weapon, researching tea, and rerolling mods can only be done one option at a time and your weapon is held until the next day in the first and last instance. Especially bad if the tied NPC decides to take their weekly day off and hold your weapon hostage for a full additional day.

- Can't drop inventory items on the ground. Once it's in your pack, the only way to free a slot is throwing an item away permanently, no take-backs.

- Can't check dropped equipment stats while they're on the ground, which is a problem because of the above bullet.

- Many enemies and their projectiles blend into the environment and get lost in the mob until they hit you with a potshot and remind you they suck.

- Every area has an enemy variant that can target you with a mortar from two rooms away and hit you with a very poorly telegraphed attack (the marker is a pale white circle when most areas are flashy colors or ALSO light colors).

Played the demo for this game at PAX West 2023, and I was excited to pick this game up once it came out.

This game has a very unique gameplay loop. Ever played Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask? Ever played as the Zora Link in that game? This game is like that but in 2-D, swimming in and out of dirt sections and doing dolphin jumps for air and speed. That comparison may turn some people off, but I think it's a fun formula, encouraging speed and finesse. You run each level once for exploration purposes, with hidden nooks and crannies to find treasure in, then you can run it again later for speed. Both types of runs are a lot of fun.

Bosses are hit and miss. Skip this section if you want to go in blind. This game performs its best when you're doing high-octane jumps and navigation through levels, and the bosses don't really fit that formula at all. Bosses 2 and 3 are at least non-offensive, being a test of your dolphin jumping capability and a formulaic exchange of blows, respectively. Bosses 1 and 4... are not great. Boss 1 features a lot of waiting around for a glacial-paced boss to get where you can damage it, and Boss 4 (the final boss) can be frustrating with having to dolphin jump to an almost-out-of-range hitbox constantly, though the second half is what I would ideally want a boss fight in this game to be, weaving in and out of diggable patches.

This game is $15 (USD). Worth the price, just know that you're here for a fun time, not a long time. The demo covers all of World 1 except the boss, and the entire game is done after 4 Worlds. I was able to 100% complete the game in around 6 hours with all achievements. Good for a couple short-burst sessions over the week, or an all-day binge. I hope the devs can continue the momentum and possibly deliver a Pepper Grinder 2, or at least some similarly fast-paced game if not a sequel.