Recent reviews by Frankie Spankie

Children of the Sun is a really unique sniper/puzzle game that feels like a bit of an acid trip as you take down a cult. Did I pique your interest?

There's not much story here aside from some minor cutscenes before each stage. There's not even a single word of dialogue. But what you do see is interesting nevertheless. You get to see a cult taking over and harming its own members as you go on a revenge tour to take the cult down.

The game play is rather simplistic in nature. You can only run left and right. In fact, this whole game can be played with just a mouse. You move around in a circle or maybe between two objects if you can't fully encircle an area. Mark all the targets in the stage and find your ideal starting point. Once you take a shot and hit your target, time slows down dramatically and you can change direction of your bullet. You get one shot and you have to take down everybody in the stage to advance. Most stages have a challenge for you to strive for as well.

You'll unlock some minor abilities and find new enemies as you progress. You can curve bullets, speed bullets up, or even redirect them without hitting anything provided you fulfill the requirements. You can also aim for birds flying around the level to give yourself a new vantage point.

The game is short and sweet but it's really unique. I finished it in about 3-3.5 hours and had a blast all the way through. If you're looking for a unique indie game, this is a must play.

One recommendation, if a dev is reading this, is it would be nice if you added an option to restart from where you shot at what time you shot instead of always forcing you to the starting point. The last mission for example, I would always rush to the far right side and immediately take a shot. It's a minor thing but I think it would be a nice QoL to just let me retake the shot from the same spot and time instead of running to the same position over and over every time I retry.

I gave Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA a fair shot and played almost 5 hours and it's just simply not for me. I've heard great things of the story but after 5 hours, practically nothing happens. There's more story in the prologue (which takes about 45 minutes) than there is in the next 4 hours combined. The entire story so far has been that you're on a boat that capsizes and end up on a deserted island. From there, you spend hours just finding other castaways. There were a couple dream sequences that were incredibly cryptic but that's it.

The gameplay is serviceable but nothing to write home about in my opinion. The dodge feels a little unresponsive for my liking. I don't know if the game is bugged or something but I noticed if you just save your ultimate attacks for bosses, you can practically one shot them. The standard mobs basically put up more of a challenge as a result. After 3 hours or so, I found myself just dodging through areas to avoid getting hit and trying to speed run through areas instead of fighting monsters.

I also really hate the healing method. You have to stand still to "rest" and you slowly heal. The problem is you have to stand for about 5-10 seconds before healing even begins, and then you probably have to stand for another 30-40 seconds to fully heal. It just feels like such a time sink.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad game but it just didn't do anything to grip me and make me want to continue. I was reading up a bit on the game and saw that the story doesn't really start to pick up until chapter 5, I was only half way done with chapter 2. I did not have much desire to muscle through another 15-20 hours of a very simple story in hopes that I would like the rest of the it.

This was a really enjoyable game from beginning to end. I got this game because I recently got an HDR monitor and I wanted to test it out and it certainly is gorgeous. I think the character models leave a little to be desired but the robots and worlds look great.

The combat is really fun. I personally enjoyed the stealth approach even though the stealth mechanics are very basic in the game. It was fun diving towards tall grass, luring prey, and killing them quickly. Even when it was an enemy too big to one shot, it opened up a window where you could deal some big damage. There's melee and ranged attacks although you'll primarily be performing range attacks with your bow which is really fun. There are also some traps to use as well.

The story is also really interesting. It felt fresh to be in a world that felt like a tribal setting for humans but had killer machines roam the earth. I wanted to learn what caused this and the journey to find out why the world because the way it did and Aloy's path to find out about her own history was a lot better than I thought it would be.

I'm not too keen on open world games and I didn't think this one did it particularly better/worse than others. The issues I have with the open world setting still hold true here but I won't go into too much detail since that's more of a setting choice for me vs game flaws.

My one main complaint about the game is the fact that the game wants to be like an RPG and give you gear options between armor and weapons. The problem is that it feels like such an after thought because you don't actually unlock anything. As far as I can tell, you buy all your gear from merchants. I honestly forgot there even was gear until half way through when I started to realize fights were taking a long time against bigger machines. Then the fights started feeling more tedious than challenging. You could scan machines for what their weaknesses are and I never even got any weapons for two of the weaknesses. If the game is going to force you into a system of elemental strengths/weaknesses, they have to present it better and give you one of everything as you progress through the story.

I was a bit hesitant to try this one because just about every other hyped up Playstation game that finally got ported to Steam left me disappointed. Horizon Zero Dawn was not that case. It made me want to keep trying more Playstation games. I think there's still some flaws and not as perfect as others make it out to be but it's still a really good game nevertheless.

This is a great collection of games. The beat em ups are especially great playing with friends. Remote Play works great for that too so only one person needs to buy the game! $40 is a bit steep for what's included so I'd recommend waiting for a sale but all the games are fun to play through!

This is a really solid creature collector game, similar to Pokemon. None of the Coromon feel particularly weak. There are some nice QoL changes like how you can level up Coromon that aren't in battles to allow you to grind one quickly. You can try new moves you unlock and quickly switch it out if you don't like it. Sometimes you'll fight multiple Coromon but the game will scale them down several levels so they don't feel overpowered. There's a lot of small but welcome changes from what you'd be used to in Pokemon.

A big difference within the story is that instead of collecting badges by defeating gym leaders, you fight legendary Coromon. These are Coromon you cannot catch. They have about 10x the health similar leveled Coromon have but their attacks will be just the same. Most of them have some kind of gimmick as well that typically triggers when you get them to half HP to throw you off. If you have trouble, just abuse items on the stronger Coromon against that type legendary or grind. Don't worry, there's also XP boosters to grind faster.

The world has some beautiful pixel art. A lot of the Coromon have some cool designs and the attack animations on the stronger attacks are really fun to watch too. If you're looking for a Pokemon-like game but don't have a Nintendo system, this is definitely for you. Even if you have a Nintendo system, I still think this is worth your time. It took me about 25 hours to complete it. I enjoyed it all the way through, definitely recommend it if you want to play something like Pokemon.

Amid Evil VR is a straight port of the base game for Amid Evil. Amid Evil was a personal favorite of mine and they did a pretty good job with this port. It doesn't feel like other lazy VR ports, the controls actually feel like you would expect them for VR. All the tutorial is done with one controller type but the controls are rather minimal so it will be easy to figure out regardless.

I think this style shooter is better suited for flat screen but it's definitely a well done VR title if you're looking for a boomer shooter in VR!

Nuclear Blaze is a pretty fun indie 2D platformer as a firefighter investigating a secret lab. The music is really good, although there's not enough of it. The mechanics work and it was fun trying to solve some minor puzzles as you put out fires to reach the next area. The game can be completed in about 2 hours and I enjoyed the whole 2 hours.

Now the frustrating part is after you complete the game, you can unlock "Hold My Beer" mode which is basically hard mode with some new paths you have to take. I was enjoying it at first but after you get about a quarter of the way through the game, it becomes too difficult due to poor game mechanics. You have to be incredibly precise in all of your movements, jumps, dodges, etc as you race to put out the first completely before it spreads. Even one missed jump, missed dodge, misstep will lead you to failure and have to restart the room. I don't normally mind challenging platforming but the jumping, climbing, and dodging doesn't feel precise enough for this kind of difficulty.

I enjoyed the first run, I wanted to do the second, but I gave up on the second just because I thought the game mechanics weren't good enough for the difficulty presented. I still enjoyed the base game however, and would recommend it.

I'm on the fence with The Last Friend.

This is kind of a Plants vs Zombies clone with lanes for a tower defense game but it's also a beat em up. You control a character who runs around the level and can fight enemies while turrets also do their thing. All of the mechanics are rather basic between tower defense and beat em up. It certainly works pretty well for what it is.

Now I don't know if maybe the game isn't for me, even if I got it to relive some PvZ nostalgia, but after about 2 hours, I don't really have any desire to go on. The first turret you get is very strong and you can level it up to cover three lanes. After about an hour and a half, you'll enter levels with 5 lanes so it prevents you from just building those turrets down the middle but I still just found myself building those in lanes 2 & 4 over and over. As a result, every level started feeling rather repetitive.

Fortunately, there are some levels that are strictly beat em up to break up the pacing a bit. I did enjoy the first hour and a half or so but it starts to drag from there. I got the game cheap as part of a bundle so I'm happy with my purchase with my limited experience with it but your miles may vary. I'd say it's worth picking up on the cheap if you can find it at the right price.

​​​​​I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not a Marvel fan. I don't hate Marvel, I just don't really care for it one way or the other. I suspect that this is one of those games that get all the praise it gets because most people playing it are Marvel fans. I really didn't know anything about Guardians of the Galaxy going in to this game.

First, the game is beautiful. I got a new OLED monitor with HDR and quite frankly, it looks amazing. I was recommended to try this game and I can see why the monitor I got is so highly rated. It legitimately felt like I was playing a movie. The graphics are great and the lighting is even better with HDR.

The soundtrack is great, Zero to Hero (which is a song made specifically for this game) has quickly become a favorite of mine. The rest of the soundtrack is great too. The dialogue between characters and even just the banter as you explore levels is great. There were a lot of moments that had me laughing. I loved all the characters and the way they interacted with each other. Unfortunately, sometimes the banter was cut off because you reached a checkpoint and the game snapped into the next dialogue.

However, I don't think this is a good game. The combat is so simple and boring that it might as well not even be there. The fights aren't challenging or fun, it just feels like a speed bump into the next scene. The fights take a while even on normal because enemies are massive bullet sponges. If you die late in a fight, you have to start the entire thing over which just made me roll my eyes every time it happened. I actually switched the difficulty to easy just to see the story because the combat sucked a lot of fun out of the game.

There's also a lot of platforming involved between fights and even the platforming is bad. The controls often times just feel unresponsive. The game is clearly designed for a controller in mind, keyboard/mouse never feels right throughout the entire game. Often times, I would fall because the game just randomly would refuse to use my jump jets or maybe I would run to an edge and stop but because the animations carry momentum, it would make me take an extra step and fall off. Most of the time, if you fall you just spawn where you fell from. Sometimes, however, the game would kill you and send you even further back.

The really infuriating part there is how long the load times are. I have an NVMe SSD and the load times are still pretty long. My PC will boot to Windows faster than the game would reload to the last checkpoint...

There are also some terrible quick time events. The really annoying part about this is they're few and far between. The cutscenes can be pretty long and then when you go to grab a drink or something, you get hit with a QTE when you're not ready.

The game portion of this game is just bad overall. The story, cutscenes, and dialogue are all really enjoyable but actually playing it sucks all the fun out of the game. I'm pretty shocked to see this game get as much praise as it did. I would recommend saving your money and just watching it on YouTube or something instead.

This is a rather simplistic but really fun puzzle game. Each stage is set up in a grid like pattern with hexagons where you can place a number between 1, 2, or 3 within. The goal is to make all the markers add up to the correct number. It's a math puzzle game where you have to use logic to figure out where to start and branch out.

I actually had this on mobile prior to playing on Steam so I already had a good understanding of the mechanics and how to solve certain problems going in. It took me a little under 4 hours to 100% so it's short and sweet. I suspect it would have taken me a bit over 4 hours if I didn't already have a good understanding of the game and its mechanics going in. You can play it for short spurts or in long sessions, whichever fits your needs!