Recent reviews by Dr jebus

Still the most gorgeous game of 2015, now with a new batch of locations that blend seamlessly with the existing content. A great re-release, featuring quality of life improvements and a metroid-vania that is still a three-course-meal for your eyes and ears.
Combat is definitely the weakest component of classic Ori, but the movement and camera is absolute top-tier.

If you enjoy at least one of the characters on the roster, you will have fun playing this game.
I think at the bottom of the list for a "thematic moveset" would be Magneto. His kit is powerful, but it's a lot more "neato" and a lot less "magnet."
The very top of the list is Spidey, no contest. The swinging, the crawling, running on walls and ceilings, pull folks toward you, pull yourself to them. He's an absolute blast.

The most engrossing, compelling, wretched, heart-pounding experience is contained within the parameters of this RPG. Permanent death to your soldiers, a relentless composition of creatures and evil-doers, and a comprehensive base-management phase that compliments the dungeon-crawling without getting in the way. A masterpiece of turn-based head-scratching, and some damn fine multiplayer as well.

I like this game. It is a clever mix of bullet hell and typing simulator.

But it's Locked at 30fps.

This grotesque headache I feel right now is caused by 30fps, and I simply cannot recommend.

The movement and combat is SUPER tight. Great work here.
The camera is awful. The speed of screen panning on vertical jumps and changing facing direction is extremely painful to my eyes.
The environments are nice and detailed, but often indistinguishable due to severely repetitive textures. Not enough landmarks to keep track of where I've been.
The difficulty curve starts out in the negative, and stays there until you bring the dash ability into the mandatory pogo sections, then gets a MUCH-APPRECIATED upward spike with a particularly energetic bunch of intelligent, ruthless bugs.
There is a great deal of skill ceiling on display here. The astute player can experiment with the advanced movement techniques for extra hits and openings to exploit enemy vulnerabilities.
Definitely worth it eventually, but if I didn't have a friend watching, I would've dropped this earlier because of how painful the camera is.

I assumed this was going to be a dumb filler story. No Kevin Conroy? The devs/publishers of Arkham Knight felt like they had to release "some lame batman game" to keep the hungry fans happy? Must be awful, right?
I am glad to be wrong.
This prequel is extremely well done, and if someone asks "what is your favorite Christmas game?" I now have a proper answer. The interactions between Batman and the Young Jim Gordon are super intense. Even though you know how the story goes, there will be a point where you think "they will never get along..."
And yes, the title music is a beautiful blend of Batman brass and the masterpiece: Carol of the Bells.
Lots of cool villains in the mix, some old faces, some B-list, some nice twists from the creators to make it more interesting than "go beat up these eight assassins."
Detective mode has some very cool mechanical additions.
Side missions fit appropriately in-universe. Puzzles for tracking down collectibles are also appropriately in-universe.
Do yourself a favor, and don't read up the story or any spoilers. You're in for a treat.
My only gripe is two changes to combat:
- The cape-stun into aerial redirect attack for Batman is *extremely* risky to include in your freeflow, because you execute a very slow two-handed strike after landing, and you are *almost always* wide open to attacks. You should use this only when you have two guys left, otherwise you are taking a hit.
- There is a late-game upgrade that is awesome for combos, BUT I found that it made ground-pound combat takedowns nearly impossible to implement in story mode (but seemed to work fine in the training exercises???). Thankfully, you don't need to use that upgrade for the freeflow challenges.
Oh, and the BOSS FIGHTS!!
I love being wrong.
The boss fights are really excellent.
Additionally, you can start with a hard difficulty right off the bat, which hides the combat indicators. I don't recommend this.....there are some non-intuitive segments that have new mechanics that were not present in Asylum or City, and you might get really annoyed if you don't have the indicators turned on for your first playthrough.

Puzzles and time travel and giant robots and giant monsters and good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, if this isn't the most well-polished UI in the Known Universe!
Want to know what something does before you waste your suboptimal turn and doom hundreds of human lives?
Mouse-over tooltips baby.
MOUSE-OVER ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TOOLTIPS.
I'm not joking around: most other games that involve tooltips, you have to hover for a second until they show up, because "maybe the player doesn't really care about these tooltips most of the time."
Into the Breach violates this paradigm deliberately and surgically. The only reason your cursor exists is for the tooltips, and they pop up *instantly.*
Want to know what the enemy monsters are going to do?
AND in what order?
TOOLTIPS!
I love this all over again, because it seamlessly blends game mechanics with the story: you are time-travelers. The tooltips help you see the future and plan accordingly.
Mechanically, this is brilliant, elegant, and precise.
To top it all off, the puzzle-based combat has tons of solutions available. Figuring it all out is satisfying.
Being confronted with an extremely complex puzzle is daunting, and picking apart the variables to find the most optimal solution will deliver those oh-so-satisfying "AHA!" moments.
Buy it. It's damn good.

Scrabble through cultist nonsense for clues to identify and banish an Elder God invading our reality.
Or be killed by unspeakable cosmic horrors.
Or succumb to insanity and kill yourself.

Initial impressions are rad. The satisfaction of an alpha strike hitting an opposing mech, the crumpling of the opposing robots. Sweet headshots. Stomping on vehicles and watching them pop.
That satisfaction wears off after about 20 hours, and the rest of this game is a cozy grind. The AI is easily abused EXCEPT for certain base defense missions (you know who you are!)
Lots of great map variety, the visuals are terrific. Mech models are *Absolutely Astoundingly Good*.
After about 40 hours, game is solved. You'll suss out which mechs have optimal hardpoint selection, and optimal mech quirks to min-max it so hard you'll break it over your knee.
Story Mode and Campaign mode are designed with an extremely soft failure point: time only passes in transit, so as long as you scrape together enough C-bills for month-end expenses, you can't lose.
Difficulty modifiers are nice for replayability and achievement grinding (if you care for that), but the only difficulty you can modify is the economy: the numerical values that dictate progression of power creep. The AI is always the same, so consider the popular ultra-overhaul mods that make the AI very smart (but you'll need a BEAST of a CPU for it to be playable!)

The Sequel of 2020
The Sequel of 2021