Recent reviews by Topo

Very fun and well-crafted metroidvania with a good variety of locations and mechanics as well as unexpected beat-'em-up inspired action. I love its Gina Sisters DS-like atmosphere and the catchy music!

A charming blend of Contra and Saturday-morning-cartoon tropes made by the developer of the amazing Contra 4 (NDS, 2007). It's not as good as this or the classic Contra games, but a well-made and fun substitute. It offers a story mode with a save function and three difficulty settings as well as two unlockable modes (arcade and speedrun) that you have to beat in one sitting.

Please more short and dense arcade-style action platformers like this!

This one really surprised me... I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be one of my favorite Mega Man clones (and there are many I've played).

The controls are great, the stages are well designed and varied (while not overly gimmicky). The bosses are fun and the last three (e.g. the big skeleton thing from the trailer) top most of the action platformer boss designs made by one-man developers. The game also has a light RPG leveling system, but that's rather accessory or could be considered as a kind of micro difficulty adjustment.

The music is especially beautiful! 8-bit-style chiptunes as you would expect from a Mega Man game. You can find the whole soundtrack for free here[soundcloud.com]. A really surprising strength of the game is the writing, its story and characters. A tale of betrayal and subtle love indeed!

The worst thing I can say about Vintage Hero is that it is too short. It only has four regular stages and two "Willy Castle" levels inculding the obligatory boss rush and three new bosses. But that's in a line with many Mega Man clones.

Everything in this game feels as if it was made with love and care. I wish for a sequel, where a certain character takes revenge!

This is a remaster of one of the most beloved Touhou doujin/fan games that was originally released in 2009 (PC only). However, the term 'fan game' is often misleading in the case of Touhou. 1. Most of them are not freeware (what this term might suggest). 2. Many of these so called 'fan games' have a higher production value than the original Touhou games made by ZUN. You can go even further and say that it's precisely the appearance of the original Touhou games that most people would expect from a doujin game. In comparison, Koumajou Remilia: Scarlet Symphony (also known as Touhouvania) looks quite professional and also sounds accordingly: with professional voice acting (new in this remaster) and an original orchestral soundtrack. So don't get the wrong impression when you hear of a Touhou fan game.

A frequent characteristic of Touhou fan games is that they pay homage to a certain classic, take its gameplay, but stage it with Touhou characters and set it in Gensoukyou, the Touhou world. In KR:SS this certain classic is, of course, Castlevania, especially Rondo of Blood (1993) from the PC-Engine (a NEC system like the PC-98 where the first original Touhou games came out), but also Symphony of the Night (PS1, 1997) in regard to the gothic reinterpretation of the Touhou character art. However, gameplaywise it's NOT a metroidvania like the latter (the Steam tags and the English Wikipedia article claim otherwise), but a classic linear platformer like the former.

And how well does it fare as a tribute to classic Castlevania? Fairly well! It starts rather weak with Stage 1 and 2, but as soon as you enter the castle in stage 3 (overall there're 8 levels plus a very long extra stage) things get much better! The jumping and whiping feels just right, and it's a joy to see Reimu walking in the badass Belmont-style! She also has a slide. Yet, only for dodging like Maria in Rondo of Blood. There's a good variety of regular enemies throughout the game, plenty of beautiful sprites that are challenging and fun to fight. Unfortunately, the level architecture is a clear weak point. The stages look rather bland and consist of much repetition. And except of stage 7 (a clock tower), there's almost no demanding platforming in the game.

What sets KR:SS apart from your ordinary Castlevania homage are Reimu's ability to fly and the danmaku-style boss figbts. Yes, you can fly, even as long as you want (unless you get hit) at any point of the game. Isn't this over-powered? Not really, the level design prevents that and you aren't especially nimble in this state. Because there's so little platforming in the game, this mechanic could almost feel redundant. However, you have to think of it more like a fighting technique. Some regular enemies will give you a hard time, if you don't use the flight (and the corresponding short range shot), and at the later boss fights flying is an absolute necessity.

As to expect from Touhou, the boss fights are the highlight of the game. Yet, it starts pretty boring with Cirno and Meiling, who you can easily bring down by simply spamming your whip and only doing a little of dodging (at least on normal difficulty and below). At latest with Patachouli (stage 6), this 'tactic' will reach its limits. Then you either learn to play reasonable and to use your flight ability properly – or you have to give up (at least on normal difficulty and above). Playing reasonable means first and formost to understand how the bosses work in this game. They have something that I call an 'incomplete pattern'. They have a fixed sequence of attacks, but from which position they attack (these bosses can go anywhere on the screen) and into which direction they shoot is always completely relative to your character's current position and movement. The bosses have no fixed path at all. So it is your task to direct the boss on a path that makes her attacks dodgeable and herself beatable. You by yourself have to complete a boss pattern that is manageable! You have to orchestrate the boss. Otherwise you will find only chaos. It's motivating, fun and eventually very satisfying to get along with the later bosses!

What leaves an unnecessarily bad taste is the price of this Steam release. It should cost half.

Post scriptum: The music is excellent!

The kind of 6,5 out of 10 recommendation.

Lament is a NES-style action platformer that borrows from Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man (with X's wall sliding/jumping). Its gameplay and the design of the 5 levels and bosses (4 selectable from the start) aren't especially great, but everything is still decent and overall I found the game quite entertaining for the short time it lasts. I also enjoyed the catchy music and the rather dark atmosphere. It's a relatively easy playthrough (by NES standards) apart from the knockback that's one of the most horrible ones I encountered in any game. So just don't get hit :D This is doable in this game.

A really cool aspect are the persistent power-ups. There're 4 to obtain: a dash, a shot, a chargable slash and a shield. You end up being very over-powered, especially with the shield.

Finally, an important advice: Don't take the first door at first! It's the strangest and most difficult level in the game and might lead you to an instant ragequit.

For other NES styled action platformers in the same price range you should check out the works of Sinclair Strange and 2ndBoss.

A kind of playable music album video (approx. 1 hour long) with gameplay inspired by the arcades, what sadly includes much Dragon's Lair, the grandfather of quick time events. However, Sayonara Wild Heart's best parts play like a rail shooter, a racer or... maybe the best comparison is a 3D Sonic game or even Nights into Dreams! Most of the time the game goes really fast and there're lots of shiny things to collect or fly through. It's not just staffage, the game has scoring and provides ranks for each of its sections.

It's obvious: Audio-visually the game is really beautiful! However, you might not notice its full beauty on your first playthrough. At first, the game forces you to play each short stage/section individually. In between, it always jumps into a menu. This totally ruins the game's flow and atmosphere. Eventually, after your first playthrough, you unlock the Album Arcade Mode, where you can play all stages without any interruption, where you can enjoy the great transitions between songs, where the game can fully unfold its magic.

Ex-Zodiac is primarily a homage to the first Star Fox (SNES, 1993). It has the flat-shaded polygons, is purely on rails, has no dogfight sections like later Star Fox games (at least not until now in Early Access), and it has the cute mumbling that only later (in SF64) became true voice acting.

However, everything is much smoother and more refined than it was in 1993! The game runs with 60 FPS (but you can also set it down to 20 or even 15 FPS for the ultimate FX Chip experience) and it has essentially the great controls of Star Fox 64! This means true analog movement/aiming and auto-centering, as soon as you take away your thumb from the stick. You can also fire multiple lock-on missiles at once just like in After Burner or Panzer Dragoon.

It's just incredible how well this indie game captures the gameplay and feel of the early Star Fox titles and mashes it up with the colorful presentation and the catchy music of a 90's arcade game!

There's a game in the game: In every stage you can find a hidden data item that unlocks a bonus level for each stage. These bonus levels are actually pretty well fleshed-out Space Harrier-style stages (with their own avatar and control scheme) that even include a boss fight at the end! So this Early Access release has already 6 Star Fox-like and 6 Space Harrier-like stages and 12 bosses.

Wishes:
- An unlockable seperated Arcade Mode where you can run through all Space Harrier levels in a row.
- I always loved that Star Fox 64 had an old-fashioned three-letter highscore list. I would like to see this in Ex-Zodiac, too.
- It's more or less impossible to read the text boxes in the heat of battle. Star Fox on the SNES did this in quiet moments and the text was less long. I think that the text length should be reduced or maybe some talented voice actors can jump in.

Finally, a Space Harrier (Arcade, 1985) homage on Steam! It looks, sounds and plays great (especially with an analog stick), but it's fairly short and easy. However, it's also a fun game for scoring (there're online leaderboards) and it has a challenging no-damage achievement.

After its price drop easily worth the money and also some of your time, if you enjoy Sega's OutRun (Arcade, 1986). Of course it's just an indie OutRun clone with only minimal animation on its sprites. So expectations down. Furthermore, it only has one single player arcade-style game mode and only one course with various sections, just like OutRun. However, it has less sections and even lacks the routing between them, which is a trademark of OutRun.

So what does it right? The gameplay is really good! The controls are responsive and fun (unfortunately only digital), the sprite scaling and the sense of speed are great! In all these regards it is, for example, superior to another OutRun clone on Steam: 80's Overdrive.

The traffic is done quite well, too, with different vehicle types on different speed and with different behaviour. Thankfully, their hitboxes are relatively gracious and enable you to slip even through narrow gaps (however, collisions with the environment can be very frustrating and painfully time consuming).

The music is also a plus! The game offers three tracks, and I think two of them (including the song that you can hear in the trailer) are really great for driving, hardly get old and overall create a cool mood together with the speed and the nice coloring.

There is a scoring system and an online leaderboard.

A wonderful indie shmup from Japan with a rare lock-on mechanic that I think most people know from (pseudo-)3D rail shooters like Sega's After Burner (Arcade, 1987). However, there is also Taito's Ray series, started with RayForce (Arcade, 1994), that transported this mechanic successfully into the 2D shoot-'em-up sector.

Moon Dancer has two types of lock-on systems: the standard one works just like in RayForce through a fixed reticle above your ship that moves along with your ship movement; the second one is a power-up that initiates the system of Terarin's previous game Missile Dancer (or of Edelweiss' Astebreed), where a circular field surrounds your ship in that everything gets locked-on.

Like Terarin's previous games, Moon Dancer plays sharp and fast, prefers classic STG (where fast attacking/aiming is an important thing) much over bullet hell (where defensive dodging is your first duty) and favors Compile-style fast background scrolling.

While the graphics are rather simplistic, they are nonetheless really beautiful (I especially like the huge plain-colored planets in the background). As the store page says, the NES color palette was used, giving the game the distinct darker tone of a NES shmup. Fittingly Moon Dancer features (as an addition to its regular OST) a NES-style chiptune soundtrack.

What some people may dislike and others may find challenging is the old-school way the game deals with lives: if you die, you don't just respawn but the progression stops and then restarts from a checkpoint (there're several per stage). This, of course, makes a playthrough considerable more difficult. However, the Normal mode isn't too hard – with the exception of the last stage maybe, which is a kind of boss rush.

Like all recent Terarin games Moon Dancer has a Caravan mode, a special kind of short and intense score attack, once created and established by Hudson Soft in the NES/Famicom days especially for real life tournaments: https://shmuplations.com/takahashimeijin/ However, Moon Dancer has also online leaderboards for everything.