HIGH Castlevania III is the greatest NES game ever made. Fight me.
LOW Trying to get excited for sub-par Game Boy games on a 4KTV.
WTF Why did it take 25 years to re-release Castlevania: Bloodlines?
Stop me if you’ve heard this before — a 2D platformer borrowing from Metroid and Castlevania which also has roguelike elements just hit Steam Early Access. This time, though, the game already feels finished, and has been nearly impossible to put down for the past week. Dead Cells manages to go beyond genre pastiche and freshens up one of the most crowded spaces in gaming. It’s well worth checking out even in its “unfinished” state.
HIGH The idea of explaining what was happening while Dracula slept is great.
LOW Being stuck at the elevator puzzle for way too long.
WTF Why are the skeletons the toughest enemies in the game?
HIGH Taking out a horde of enemies flawlessly while moving like lightning.
LOW The stealth section in the garden needs some tweaking.
WTF This game's Metacritic score. What the hell is wrong with people?
HIGH The battle with the Daemon Lord in Chapter 3.
LOW The godawful laser puzzle in Chapter 2.
WTF Who or what was the Lost Soul supposed to represent?
In a nutshell, I Am Alive's a post-apocalyptic story about a father who was trapped far from home when disaster struck, and is only just now returning to find his wife and daughter. There are a number of things that make this title unique, such as the extremely stark visuals, the dark, mature subject matter and the interesting combination of environmental traversal and highly non-standard combat which is more like lethal puzzle-solving than it is about punching dudes out.
HIGH The combat system once all the moves are unlocked.
LOW The first several hours.
WTF Gabriel Belmont's neck is bigger than his head.
In the days before you plugged an ethernet cable in the back of your console, letting a glitch of this nature slip through QA would have been a public relations disaster on an epic scale, and would have incurred the wrath of the entire gaming community. At Konami, someone's head would have had to roll. Apologies would have been publicly made. Free stuff would have been sent out as a way of saying sorry. These days, it's barely a blip on anyone's radar—and of those that do notice, half of them don't seem to care.
After rolling credits for both the main campaign and the Overtime mode that comes after, my thoughts about the game are basically the same—it's a note-for-note reproduction of the original with a much gentler difficulty curve and a create-a-weapon mechanic that doesn't feel like a good fit for the schedule-oriented structure of play.
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