Recent reviews by DrYoshiyahu

It's a breath of fresh air to have such a great AAA title in an era when so many highly-anticipated games continue to disappoint. Hogwarts Legacy is clean and polished; the combat is smooth, fun, dynamic, and customisable.

The talent system feels meaningful, and the potions and items players can spend time preparing and cultivating can make a significant difference if the player needs to gear up before bigger encounters.

The difficulty feels great, and it's nice that going from normal to hard doesn't just make enemies tankier or deal more damage, but actually makes the timing of dodges and shields tighter—it makes it feel harder in a way that's deserved and rewarding to overcome.

It does sometimes feel like the game's hotbar system is limiting, and even frustrating to use. Players can unlock up to four hotbars, but each one only fits four spells. Given that the player can cycle between them seamlessly and without cooldown or restriction makes the whole thing seem needlessly restrictive. It's easy to wonder if it's a symptom of game design catering to controllers where four-button layouts is the norm.

At the very least, it would be convenient to have an extra hotbar or two reserved for non-combat situations. You can easily fill a hotbar just with beast taming items and another one just for customising your base, though these are both unlocked deep into the game's progression, so it's not even an obvious issue at first.

It's quite surprising just how drawn out the pacing is. It takes a long time to unlock some very major game systems, and not in a bad way. It's nice to be hours into a big open-world game and not feel like everything has already been seen.

Even the game's talent system is unlocked a number of hours into the main story, and other features like flying, unlocking doors, taming beasts, and modifying equipment come even later than that, petered out such that you can put a couple dozen hours into the game and still have plenty of things to learn and discover for the first time.

The game also doesn't refuse players the freedom of a truly open world and the emergent gameplay that comes with it. Many puzzles, for example, are built in such a way that the player can levitate boxes and pull levers and climb obstacles, but in many cases, the game won't force you to solve the puzzle if flying on a broomstick will work just as well.

The quests are varied and the lore is expansive. The story is compelling and exciting. The only major flaw would be in some of the repetitive and shallow performances of the NPCs, which is a common issue when the same generic library of animations is recycled for every NPC, regardless of their emotional state.

Overall, it's an easy recommendation.

It's an interesting idea, but it very quickly becomes repetitive. The gameplay never changes after the first hive and the first pack of bees. Every new hive is just a cosmetic reskin of the first hive.

It's a shame that, once the player unlocks a new tier of hive, there is literally no reason to ever revisit a previous hive. They become so redundant the developer(s) even added a way to hide them from menus so players don't accidentally revisit them.

And besides the lack of inter-hive or inter-tier synergy, it's a shame that there's not even any synergies within a given hive. Players can move bees around to different hives, but outside of aesthetics, there's not actually any value to doing so.

In essence, the mechanical gameplay boils down to filling up a hive with any and every bee in that tier and then moving on to the next.

The bees themselves are also bizarre, and so far-removed from the concept of the game that it's easy to forget that the random industrial objects floating around the screen are supposed to be bees.

Players start off with bumble bees and honey bees and eventually there are TNT bees and traffic light bees and UFO bees, and the actually interesting part of cultivating a hive of bees is lost.

It's not a particularly long game, and unlocking all the hives and bees basically takes about one or two daily check-ins per tier.

The only exception is the unbelievably tedious final achievement. It's so excessively grindy, and would be completely unreasonable to achieve through normal gameplay. It takes hours and hours of repetitively buying and selling bees. It's not even gameplay, it's just navigating in-game menus.

Add on a sprinkle of clunky UI bugs and it's easy to not recommend the game.

This is such a janky game. The controls are floaty and unresponsive, there's no targeting reticule or indicator of the direction the ship is aiming, the enemies spawn and attack with no telegraphing or warning, almost nothing is actually explained to the player in terms of mechanics, and the music, visual style, and UI is all over the place.

The screenshots and trailer make it look polished and sleek, but even from the first minutes you can tell the actual core, fundamental gameplay is flawed.

It's a classic Zelda-style adventure game with plenty of exploration, collectables, and satisfying power progression. It's small, but appropriately priced for what it is, given the small indie studio (which is quickly earning a reputation for consistently hitting their mark on each release). The gameplay feels smooth, responsive, fun, and appropriately challenging for what it is.

Sometimes, the progression feels almost cliché in just how predictable it is, but it's also nice that in a genre game like this, so many mechanics are just intuitive and work exactly how you expect them to. There's no fire magic or bombs like there is in Zelda, but when the player sees an unlit brazier or a cracked wall, veteran gamers will immediately know how these things work; though It's hard to say if the same is true for noobie gamers.

It's a very open world, which can lead to situations where the player is a little out of their depth without indication, or is running into roadblocks they need more upgrades to overcome, but the payoff is that the game never feels like it's holding your hand, and the world isn't so large that backtracking ever feels like a chore.

Ultimately, it's just a charming little adventure game that's easy to pick up and hard to put down.

This is the Suika clone we were waiting for.

Yes, this is a shameless copy of Suika Game. Yes, there are a hundred others just like it out there. Yes, this is the best one.

It's not trying too hard to be its own thing—it keeps the proven, working formula while innovating and adding new ideas. The dynamic animations and particle effects are cute, the physics feel responsive and tangible, the achievements are appropriately challenging and rewarding, and the game is modestly priced.

The only real major concern is how lightweight the bigger fruit are. The whole structure almost acts like a fluid sometimes, with cherries pushing down on one side and raising melons up on the other side.

Still, the devs look reasonably receptive to feedback and balance changes, so I have hope for the future of the game in this regard, too.

If you can't get the original game on Nintendo Switch, this is the next best thing amidst an endless sea of doppelgangers. In fact, one could even argue it has more style, polish, and features than the original.

Great gameplay, great visuals, great music, lots of build options, plenty of intense late-game challenges, and power progression that defies expectations and is full of surprises.

The only thing missing would be different levels with different kinds of enemies, and some balance for those poor common items I have never ever wanted to pick.

A stunningly beautiful game with charming animations, a compelling narrative, satisfying combat, memorable boss fights, and gorgeous music. It's a little rough around the edges, with some awkward physics at times, and it can be deceptively difficult to dodge or parry certain attacks, but don't be put off by the 'Souls-like' tag the game has on Steam. It is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for even the most casual gamer, including those that don't enjoy the typical Souls-like combat dynamics.

Typical shovelware: a barely-passable game that could probably be made in less time than it takes to actually beat the game.

You can mute the music but not the SFX; you can use WASD or the arrow keys, but not both; the ball moves too slowly in the first levels and too quickly later on, and speeds up when rolling against a wall for some reason.

Worst of all, the 'mazes' are barely mazes at all. A five-year-old could beat this 'game' and then complain that it was too easy.

Unless you're an eighty-year-old dementia patient trying to relearn hand-eye coordination, it's not worth the price, whatever it is.

It's hard to identify exactly what makes the great arcade racing games so great until you play one that just misses the mark completely. It's not so much about grand concepts or new innovations: it's simply about making the core racing feel good—something this game does not do well.

Flying through the air after a jump, in particular, is where this game flops hardest. Cars have an almost absurd amount of manoeuvrability in the air, including the ability to start and stop sliding while not even touching the road; never mind how slowly the cars fall back down. This makes the cars feel super weightless and floaty, and most of the time, taking a ramp or jump is slower than just driving straight along the ground.

The tracks are passable. Many of them have shortcuts and alternate routes, some of which are only accessible using the Spring item. Unfortunately, the cuts vary wildly in terms of value—from longcuts that are never worth taking unless hunting for collectables to almost game-breaking shortcuts that make the Spring an instantly-winning item to roll on certain maps.

Worst of all is the inconsistency between what is and isn't a shortcut. This game is extremely heavy-handed with its out-of-bounds limits, and there are a number of places in several tracks that seem like perfectly reasonable shortcuts to take, using the Spring, when in reality, as soon as you leave the surface of the track, you are reset and respawn back where you started, as though you had fallen off the map. You also lose your items when you reset, which is extremely punishing considering how easy it is to do.

It is this kind of jank that makes the game rather frustrating at times. Hit a wall too hard? Reset. Hit a ramp on two wheels and go slightly sideways? Reset. Use a boost just before an incline on the track terrain? You'll soar well and truly over the track entirely and reset.

And I know for a fact that this is not a personal problem because the CPU players do the same thing. I've watched the CPU use a boost just before a ramp and sail off into the sunset, missing the track by a dozen car lengths. In some cases, CPUs will get stuck on the awkward geometry of some of the levels and end up stuck in an infinite loop where they cannot make any progress and just get lapped by everyone else.

Ultimately, the game looks rushed and unpolished. it is bare-bones at best, for an arcade racer in this generation of games.

• The number of playable characters and in-game items is small by modern standards.
• The tracks repeatedly use the same assets and themes, resulting in many of them feeling 'samey.'
• There is very little dialogue or voice work for any of the characters besides a few generic grunts and cheers.
• The soundtrack for the game is at almost elevator music levels of boring, with only one wildly unique exception in the third cup, which is a total banger.

There are just so many minor issues that add up to this feeling of jank and lack of polish. It feels like an early beta test of a game that isn't scheduled to release for another year.

Why is there no sound effect when the car hits the ground after a jump? Why is there no sound cue or dialogue when you hit an enemy with a trap item? Why does the skidding boost sound like the car is backfiring? Why is there no minimap of the track to see upcoming turns? Why are laps called 'rounds'?

I played the game to completion, unlocking everything it had to offer, which took six hours. I would not have done so if the game had not been given to me for free.

This game represents an example of dedication to a community of players that is completely unparalleled in the gaming industry.

Old School RuneScape was created when players were sick and tired of RuneScape 3 and its pay-to-win nature, its dramatic overhaul of classic game systems, and its overwhelming obsession with microtransactions and cosmetics. So the developers found an old archive of RuneScape 2 from 2007, and after polling the community to see if they really wanted to play the game as it was 'back in the good old days,' they released the game almost completely unchanged from how it had been in 2007.

And now Old School RuneScape is a game with 20 years of history that still has a dedicated team of developers releasing a new content or feature update almost every Wednesday like clockwork, and anything that affects the average existing player is polled beforehand. Almost every week, the developers poll the entire playerbase to make sure that the content they add to the game is the content the players actually want.

The game isn't for everyone, of course, being a point-and-click MMORPG that started in the late 1990's, but it's hard not to have a great level of admiration for developers that show that much commitment to making their game exactly what the players want it to be.