Recent reviews by Wasapichis El Huachinango

Great entry into the fighting game genre, easy to pick up, hard to master, and if you play May you are the scourge of the earth : )

People complain about the downtime of the severs too much. Go outside lol.

Humanity sucks, and so do I

Gameplay:
The gameplay of FOX n FORESTS can best be described as a Contra RPG but with furries with a little bit of Cuphead thrown. The gameplay is not nearly as fast and demanding, however, but it manages to still capture the niche that both Cuphead and Contra fill. While traversing each level, which are sectioned off into four different parts of a forest, there will be multiple types of enemies that will try to stop you from reaching your goal. These enemies can be dispatched with a magic crossbow bestowed upon you at the beginning, different skills, and powerful potions.

As you start to play, you will collect gold (along with other collectables) by defeating enemies, and that can be used to unlock more skills and upgrades to use during gameplay. While the item and skill progression is linear, it is handled in such a way so those skills and power ups are only accessible once you have enough gold and/or materials. Because of this, you can get early access to upgrades as a reward for exploration.

One of the first major problems with FOX n FORESTS is the fact that the combat can be stale or frustrating at times. Because you have to remain stationary in order to fire your crossbow, it is often better to use melee attacks, with one of the most useful upgrades becoming available right after the first level. Since it is your main way of ranged combat, the pacing of the game can literally come to a stop in order to take someone out from afar. In addition, some ground enemies and arial enemies are difficult to dispatch with ranged attacks.

The aerial combat, on the other hand, is actually quite nice, as you are able to use awesome melee attack to take out enemies, both aerial and grounded. It keeps the pace going, feels awesome when you are able to take out enemies skillfully, and is more convenient overall. It is quite a contrast in comparison to ranged, ground combat. You do get arrow upgrades for each section of the forest you complete, and one does help with some of the enemies. However, because it uses mana, a resource that is necessary to switch seasons in order to overcome mandatory obstacles, it is ill advised to use while season are changed, which is often.

Game Design:
The levels throughout FOX n FORESTS are well designed with lots of extra areas to explore as you get upgrades to your arsenal, and there are a few hidden secrets for those who like to explore. The reward for finding secrets are usually worth it in the form of items used to upgrade your magic crossbow, increasing your mana bar, or even getting access to bonus levels.

Most of the levels themselves function well, and the changing of seasons really adds to the flavor of each level. There is a health bar, and there are consequences for death. Throughout each level, there is a badger that you can pay to activate a checkpoint. Whenever you die, you go back to the last checkpoint bought, and any items gained, enemies defeated, and items used are completely reset. While not required to buy a checkpoint, it is recommended as dying at the end of a level without activating a checkpoint means that all progress is lost and reset. It is a nice way to be forgiving to new players as well as still having a punishment for death, preventing the game from being too easy.

The enemy designs are interesting and fun to look at, and there were only a couple instances where something looked or felt stale. The sound design for some of the enemies, however, really stood out because of the odd change in quality for the sounds. However, the animations for all of the characters, from movement to attacks, felt solid and fluid.

The music is one of the highest points in this game. The soundtrack is absolutely gorgeous, and there are so many memorable tracks throughout the time I played. To make things even sweeter, the soundtrack changes when seasons are switched, and the music feels like it reflects whatever season you are on. When you change the season from Spring to Winter, the soundtrack goes from an upbeat tune to a light melody, and when you change from Summer to Autumn, the soundtrack goes from an energetic piece to a lazy, free flowing song. These little touches really make the soundtrack stand out from everything else and help set the mood with the seasons. The boss music, on the other hand, is not so great. It is grating, way too plain, and honestly just disappointing. Despite this, the entire rest of the soundtrack is amazing, and it is only this track that is an outlier.

While on the topic of bosses, the designs for the boss fights are not that great. When first fighting bosses, especially the first one, you are thrown right into the fight. While this would not be a huge issue if bosses took most of the damage needed with regular attacks, but there are special ways to defeat each boss. You will most likely die the first time around because it is not clear what you should be doing. Once you die, the game offers to help you out, and it will tell you what you have to do. This is a very poor way of handling the boss fights because it tries to assume that the player will know how to do something specific. Not only does it end up being an artificial challenge, it also takes out any sort of enjoyment from the boss fights. As a result, what are supposed to be exciting challenges at the end of levels turns out to be a forgettable experience.

Story:
The story for FOX n FORESTS is nothing special, and it is quite predictable. While the title is primarily focused on delivering an adventurous, fun, and lighthearted game, the story tries to be a prominent point in driving the game forward. The main problem is how forced the beginning feels. While the concept for why the forests have been taken over is interesting, the sudden and awkward introduction to the story feels a bit forced. Also, there are also a few awkward sentences in the dialogue.

The characters are also pretty two-dimensional with predictable character development. Rick and Patty go back and forth for comedic effect, and while this is all done in spite at first, it ends up becoming endearing, for Rick ends up caring more than he originally did about the adventure. These characters never really evolve past that, and because there was effort put into making a story, there could have definitely been something more meaningful here. However, there are still a few funny bits of dialogue sprinkled throughout the game.

Score: 7.5/10

Read the full review here: https://grvaldez.weebly(DOT)com/fox-n-forests-review

Pros:
+Mix of Bomberman and Rougelike elements makes for amazing gameplay and replayability
+Decent challenge with a sense of progression
+Fun boss battles
+Great character design and animations
+Decent soundtrack

Cons:
-Poor AI and level design for Battle Mode
-Pathing issues
-Technical issues with controller support leads to less enjoyment and makes Battle Mode useless

Score: 8.5/10

Overall, a really fun game that although disappoints technically in some areas, still a VERY fun singleplayer game. Highly recommend to anyone looking for a new rougelike to play. Could easily be a 9/10 if these technical issues were fixed.

You can read the full review over on my website: https://grvaldez.weebly(dot)com/bombslinger-review.html

Overview:
Bio Inc. Redemption is a resource-management strategy game that has the player either saving or killing patients with various diseases. As you play though the single player, different challenges and objectives grow more diverse and difficult, while the online mode offers a way to compete against your friends or strangers to either save a patient's life, or cause their unruly demise.

Gameplay:
Bio Inc. Redemption offers two distinct but similar ways of playing: life or death. In life, you are tasked with finding each disease that plagues a patient, and curing them of their ailments before they die. In death, the player is tasked with killing their patients by evolving diseases until their patient is overwhelmed. Players must harvest three different tiers of resources, and each style of play determines what kind of upgrades they can choose from. Harvesting resources is as easy as holding down the left mouse button until the resource is harvested, but the higher tiered resources disappear quickly, and these resources spawn randomly across all of the body’s systems.

During these campaigns, a patient’s vital signs are displayed in overall health, and other vital signs are broken up into the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, skeletal, nervous, renal, immune, and muscular system. All of the patient’s systems affect the overall health of a patient, and if one system fails, the rest of the systems begin to deteriorate. Once a patient’s symptoms and vitals reach a low enough point, they will visit a doctor routinely, and once a patient has a system in danger of failing, they will be rushed to the ER, and the efforts made to save the patient will increase, and it will make killing the patient more difficult.

While playing life, certain systems of a patient will deteriorate, so you must diagnose each disease that is affecting the body in order to treat it. You get general hints of what might be causing illnesses through symptom severity. Collected resources are used to perform tests to see if a patient has positive or negative reads for certain diseases. If tests come back positive for disease(s), then resources can be spent to treat those ailments, and both diagnosing and treating diseases take time. Once you cure your patient, you win, or you win when you have completed that level’s objective. You lose once your patient has reached 0% overall health.

On the flip side, playing death has you creating diseases, promoting unhealthy lifestyles, and cause medical hardships for a patient. Once you instill disease into a patient, you can cause greater harm by essentially upgrading these diseases from disease trees. Certain diseases and detriments can only be unlocked when you have met one or multiple prerequisites, such as having obesity or having certain diseases. You win when you kill your patient or complete the level’s objective, and you lose if your patient has been cured.

Each playstyle offers, as mentioned before, lifestyle changes, and resource investments that can help in the long run. For life, you can invest resources to slow down the deterioration of certain systems in a patient to give more time to cure them. You can also restore a system’s health up to a certain point with surgeries with some of the For death, you can invest in bad habits to boost the effectiveness of diseases in certain systems, increase the chance of developing random diseases, reducing the effectiveness of treatments, and more.

While the gameplay is simple, it tries to make up for it with its complex system of play. With thousands of possibilities and strategies, the replayability can be quite strong. Games are long, however, and this can either be a blessing or a curse to some. In addition, as you play and complete levels, you gain experience based on a few factors, and that experience goes to leveling up your player’s account. As you gain levels, you can select perks to help you in either campaign, and more player levels unlock more perk slots.

One of the biggest and obvious disparities between life and death gameplay is how straightforward the gameplay is. Death is a bit more obvious, and the gameplay seems more intuitive and requires less of a complex understanding in order to have fun and play effectively. Life, on the other hand, seems to be more of an educated guessing game. Although it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and it has its own strategy for playing, death felt much more rewarding and easier to grasp. In addition, the harder levels feel like they almost require perks. While it makes sense to have trouble beating hard level immediately, it felt more like the difficulty was designed to be combated only if you have certain perks rather than be a test of skill and strategy.

Game Design:
The game’s graphics are standard at best. They get the job done, but the awesome part is how each bodily system is designed. When you select a system, the internal workings of that system are displayed, and as a patient’s health deteriorates, afflicted systems begin to deteriorate as well. It was a neat touch that added to the experience.

That being said, the game’s animations get in the way of gameplay. Because resources spawn on a patient’s model, any time the model moves, the resources move with the model itself. It makes it difficult to collect resources during animations and makes harder levels artificially difficult. There are also blood animations that are distracting, but there is an option to turn these off. In addition, the game allows you to dress up patients as different characters, such as political figures, holiday mascots, and even gaming personalities, but these also end up being distracting and can hide resources accidentally. It is also recommended to avoid costumes unless for novel or comedic reasons.

The UI in Bio Inc. Redemption is straightforward and works quite well. The information can be a little overwhelming at times, but everything you need is unobstructed, and it will always be available for you at the a press of a button. You can also set custom keybindings to quickly swap between most sections for a better experience.

The music provided in this game is alright. The menu music is good, and the themes that play during life and death gameplay are alright. There is a frantic track that plays while a patient is in the ER, but it can be a bit grating, especially when a heart monitor is constantly beeping. The music does not loop perfectly, but it is a bit more forgivable in this case because there is not a huge gap between replays.

The game had a couple technical issues, and I had the game crash twice on me during multiplayer. Oddly enough, it never crashed during single player, but it made playing multiplayer a bit of a drag when it crashed. There was also a glitch in single player that did not allow me to see the symptoms of a patient. Other than these two problems, no other technical issues seem to be present.

Online:
Bio Inc. Redemption has a multiplayer aspect to it, and it consists of a ranked mode and a casual mode that you can use to play with your friends. Rankings are divided into overall rank, life rank, and death rank. While playing online, you can choose between the life, death, or a random side, and the matchmaking will pair you with the opposite choice. In multiplayer, you compete against your opponent to save or kill the same patient. It operates the same way as the single player mode, except there are no perks, and you are playing against another person in real time. Queues are long, however, and take anywhere from 3-5 minutes to find, but selecting random helps with the long wait. There is also an option to change what multiplayer mode to play as while in the lobby. Since there is only versus mode, this would imply that more multiplayer modes will be released eventually.

Score: 7.5/10

Read the full write-up here: https://grvaldez.weebly(dot)com/bio-inc-redemption-review.html

Overview:
The Station is an indie-developed title that focuses on exploration and puzzle-solving skills rather than combat. The game puts players into the shoes of a recon specialist who is tasked with traversing the barren Espial to find out what happened to the ship, its inhabitants, and to discover the nature of the hostile alien civilization. As the truth is uncovered behind the Espial, that truth will forever change the two civilizations.

Gameplay:
The Station has a style of gameplay that has a player walking around, picking up pieces of story, and trying to figure out what happened and what to do next. The meat of the gameplay revolves around puzzle-solving and item collecting. You have to collect certain items in order to progress through the game, and in order to get these items, you have to solve a puzzle. These puzzles are contextualized within the story of The Station, and this gives these puzzle an extra level of depth to them. While these obstacles are more contextualized, the puzzles themselves are not too hard, and I would almost argue that they were not hard enough. This is slightly forgivable since exploration rewards the player with more story and character complexity.

These puzzles range from finding small parts to fix a robot, returning tools to gain access to an ID that allows the opening of doors, and calibrating energy tanks by matching symbols. While not inherently part of the puzzles, players can also grab onto small object to examine them more closely, open draws, doors, and flick switches on and off. You can bring items closer to yourself, and in doing so, can also rotate the item as well. While most of the time it is not important for progressing through the game, it is something for the player to do. It is not the most perfect system, for rotating something just the right way to be able to read is more easily said than done. I would often times just tilt my head to read something since it was easier.

Additionally, you can zoom the camera in to look at other objects in the world, but you cannot move and zoom in at the same time, which is a minor shame. That being said, The Station does do something pretty neat that compliments this. The player’s map, objectives, inventory, audio log database, and more, are presented to the player directly into the world; there is no dedicated pause screen for these things. You interact with buttons, maps, dialogue bits, and so on in real time in the world. It again is not perfect, but it was a neat and engaging way to interact with the world.

Game Design:
The game’s graphics are nothing to be scoffed at. Made in Unity, The Station boasts a creepily beautiful environment for players to explore. Lots of detail went into the environment, and it was a must for a game like this. Many books are scattered around the world for players to find, and they give an insight into the character that is assumed to own these books. The atmosphere is set up extremely well, and it does a good job at giving jumps at times. Although some of these jumps are cheap, there is one in particular that has a lot of character to it.

The music in the game was composed by the legendary Duncan Watt, who composed music for both Bioshock Infinite and League of Legends. The music adds to the tone of the game and fits perfectly well into the space setting as well. In addition, the sound design is handled very well, and little additions like walking over liquid or glass add to the immersion of the game.

Although there were no major bugs during gameplay, the game did crash when starting up for the first time, but everything worked fine once I booted the game back up again.

The biggest flaw with The Station’s design is easily its length. The ending to the game leaves much to be desired, and it could have easily gone on for another hour or so. While making a game like this too long is detrimental, having it be too short also hurts it a little. The world is immersive, and it could have gone on for much longer, and the ending of the game even felt a little rushed. It took me a little under two hour to finish the game, and for a $15 price tag, it can be a little hefty for some. This is magnified even more by the lack of replayability The Station has other than to complete all of the puzzle or find all the bits of story sprinkled throughout the ship.

Another minor complaint would be the voice acting. While no one expects top-notch levels of voice acting in an indie game, the inflections for some of the lines could have definitely been improved. While the characters were good, the voice acting took away from the story a little bit, and this is fairly noticeable during some of the most important moments in the story. Had the voice acting been just a little better, the story would have been delivered in a much stronger fashion.

Story:
The Station’s main draw is easily its story. With the story intertwined so closely with every other element of the game, it is difficult not to talk about it. The main objectives of the game are to find the three inhabitants on board the Espial, Aiden Vyse, Silas Haze, and Mila Lexa. While looking for these three, you find audio logs, small bits of dialogue, and letters written for and by the characters that give you a scope of their personal story, both with each other and their individual lives. The more you explore, the more complex each person’s story becomes. While not every bit of story needs to be discovered in order to understand the general scope of The Station, it does add in a meaningful way.

Small hints through the game give interesting worldbuilding elements, and also, as mentioned before, give more depth to each character. If searched for enough, the characters are complex with their own goals, motivations, and flaws. The game also gives just enough to make the player want to keep going through to find what happens next in the story. There is also a twist ending that is alluded towards towards the end of the game, and it did not feel too obvious, but again, the game ended too abruptly for things to really sink in. The ending is just pushed on you suddenly, but it was still a mostly satisfying story.

Verdict:
The Station offers an engaging story that relies and delivers convincingly through environmental storytelling, puzzles, and exploration. Technical issues and minor game flubs aside, the only major issues that stick out are its length, initial price tag, and the sub-par voice acting. Although it is hard to recommend to all to purchase at $15, anything around or below $10 makes this game a worthy play for the experience.

Score: 8/10

Legrand Legacy: Tales of Fatebounds

Overview:
Legrand Legacy is a loveletter to JRPGs old, aiming to represent earlier entries into other series’ such as Final Fantasy, Legend of Dragoon, and Dragon Quest. The game is about Finn, a slave, who is emancipated, and vows to save his liberator’s sick daughter. Along the way, he is lead to a prophecy, and joins the group called Fatebounds to bring peace to his world before it tears itself apart. Along the way, Finn will battle enemies, travel across Legrand, and find out about his past that brings together an ambitious experience.


Gameplay:
The gameplay in Legrand Legacy is somewhat interesting, offering slightly in-depth combat, tactics, towns, characters, and exploration. The main gameplay is heavily similar to Final Fantasy VII in that you control the main character, Finn, and you walk around an overworld, traveling from location to location and fighting enemies occasionally.These enemies take the form of balls of shadow, and act similar to those of the persona series. If you run into these balls, you will enter into combat, and if you run into them while they are turned around, or vice versa, combat will begin with an advantage for whoever ran into the other from behind.
In combat, there are standard attacks, items, grimoires (spells), misc moves, and special moves that can be performed. Each player and enemy has a set type of static attack (slash, impact, pierce), certain elemental attacks (fire, water, earth, lightning) and enemies have strengths and weaknesses according to their types. Each playable character also has a special attack that charges up when you perform attacks, and can be unleashed for a satisfying, devastating blow.

Combat mixes in some tactics and the ability to move characters around in a front row of three spots, and a back row of three spots. Melee characters can only use melee attacks if they are in front, and if an opponent is in the front row as well. Ranged characters can hit anyone from anywhere, and grimoires can be used by anyone against everyone. When battling, there is a sort of queueing system, where characters that have chosen their Melee/Ranged attacks will go first, and those that use their grimoires go second. When attacked while using a grimoire, there is a chance you will be interrupted, and your spell will not go through. This adds a bit more depth to the combat, as you have to plan out your attacks and positioning depending on a fight.
All attacks, guards, etc. are determined by a quick time event; when prompted, you have to press a button at the right time to successfully perform the attack, or land in a sweet spot to gain a bonus to the attack. While it is a nice feature to have in order to put more excitement and control into the battle, it does get a little monotonous after a while, and more variety in attack executions would have helped it break away from that.
Once you slay enough enemies, you level up, and can distribute two skill points across 5 skills, and once certain skill levels are met, you can unlock new grimoires to use. It was a fun and great way to unlock new spells, and it felt like your characters were actually progressing through their journey.
There are some weird difficulty spikes, namely with the second area, where some enemies can one or two shot the entire party. It felt a little weird that a standard enemy was harder to fight than a boss, so there are very small instances of balancing issues, but once you get your bearings, there is an appropriate challenge.


Game Design:
One of the first things you notice when playing Legrand Legacy is its graphics. The character models and animated cutscenes aren’t exactly the most up-to-date things on the market at the moment, even in terms of indie games. That being said, it is admirable and commendable that there are even animated cutscenes in an indie game.
The backgrounds, foregrounds, character portraits, and item portraits are all beautifully drawn, and this starkly contrasts with the game’s models and talking heads. That being said, the models in game, both with enemies and characters, make up for it with interesting character design. Although not all character designs are quite up to par, most felt interesting and had enough to offer that stopping for a moment and really appreciating the time that went into creating the model did not feel wasted.
While the landscapes are pretty to look at, traveling around can feel clunky at times. While it tries to move like Final Fantasy VII, it fails to replicate the fluid movement that FFVII had to offer. Often times, getting stuck on a wall or obstacle is unexpected, and the directional movement does not match up with how the camera is situated. In addition, sometimes the camera placement in areas can be frustrating, with objects blocking the view of play, or having some obstacles or paths be unclear.
The UI works most of the time, and same with controller support. Everything flows nicely with the UI, and things are mostly organized and presented smoothly. The dialogue boxes are not properly optimized, so the text will stretch and shrink in the middle of text being displayed a lot of the time, but it is an issue easily overlooked, and I am sure it is an easy fix as well. I had minor issues with the controller, where my analog sticks would not register, but after a restart, everything worked again. Other than that, controller works about 95% of the time. There are some shops, namely crafting shops, where the analog stick will only work when it feels like it. The D-pad still works for these instances, but it was a minor annoyance for it to not work for no discernable reason.

Story:
Legrand Legacy’s story is a typical story of prophecies and chosen ones. It does not stray much from a standard hero story, and as a result, it is extremely cliche at times. That being said, some characters have decent character development, and the writing can shine at times. Humor and the characters really carry the story along more than the actual meat of the story. The major problem arises with the main character, who almost feels sidelined for most of the story. Although he is the main character, the most interesting and complex developments happen outside of his character, and as a result, he feels unimportant and unrelatable. Later on, Finn starts to become more relevant as he regains his memories, but it would have been neat to see him have more agency before this point.

Verdict:
Overall, Legrand Legacy: Tales of Fatebound is an enjoyable experience to hardcore fans of the classic JRPG series. It offers enough that it is worth checking out, but it might be a turn off to newcomers, or those that are accustomed to modern JRPGs. While there are technical issues, a bland story, and oddities here and there, the gameplay is fun, and there is a decent challenge that awaits those who journey into the realm of Legrand.

Score: 7/10

This is probably the quintessential Fallout gaming experience.

Maggie's Apartment is a point & click adventure game that roughly took me about 3 hours to finish from start to finish. Throughout the story, you meet a variety of colorful characters, most of them non-human. The dialogue itself if wonderful, and the jokes throughout the game are clever, silly, and downright smart. I am a sucker for good dialogue, so this game was an honest treat.
The story itself is very cute, and at the same time, kind of heart-wrenching towards the end. The game, however, relies on point-and-click and some puzzle solving to progress the story. I am not fond of point & click games, but I love a good puzzle. This game had a nice blend of the two, and I was invested enough in the story to get past the point-and-click aspect of the game. The difficulty is also not too hard. There are some spots that had me stumped for a little while, but I was able to progress through trial and error. Some parts were a little confusing, and the first real obstacle was finding out you can drag items to make them interact with other objects and such.
The art style is interesting but unique. I loved Maggie's design and the general art direction of the game. The sound effects and movement of the characters were perfect, and it didn't take away from the story or immersion at all. The animation is a bit choppy, but once you get used to it after a few minutes of playing, you really start to appreciate the style. There were a few instances, however, where the sound felt out of place or too low. This is not a serious problem and is easily overlooked.

Overall, I highly recommend this game to anyone that's a fan of adventure, point & click, or just a good story in general.
10/10, would get emotional over a radish again.