Recent reviews by Moogle Emperor

TLDR: A fun and frenetic boomer shooter with Lovecraftian stylings, cool weapons, and fantastic boss and enemy variety.
Let's get the bad out of the way first.
Between performances that seem recorded without any context and a script that's utterly tonally inconsistent, the voice acting is '90s bad. Generously, it may have been intended as an homage. If so, I don't think it worked, because the rest of the game is played quite straight.
A lot of the levels boil down to hunting for red, blue, and yellow keys.
Now the good:
As mentioned, fantastic boss and enemy variety. Far too many boomshoots boil down to a reskinned Doom clone, especially when it comes to their opposition. Not so, this. Across more than twenty distinct enemy types, I can think of maybe *one* that you could directly map to a Doom equivalent. Each of the bosses offers a different challenge, and several of them are really cool. New enemies showed up as late as the fifth act without the early acts feeling lacking in variety,.
While the levels too often dip into the three-key well, they are otherwise nicely differentiated. You get a real progression of environments as things get weirder and worse. Some are closed in, some wide open, some are platform heavy, some puzzle heavy, some are natural, some man-made, some supernatural.
The weapons and movement generally feel quite good to use.
Overall I was very pleasantly surprised by this one and would rank it high in the boomer shooter ranks.

One of the greatest games ever made, and one of the most poorly sold.

The Bazaar has gone through multiple pricing permutations just since its Steam launch this year. It had previously flirted with F2P models, and even, briefly, with using NFTs. Even now, it's $20 per DLC character, a desperately optimistic price point. The only thing its pricing models have had in common is how much the audience hated them. The devs overcommunicate and their communications always make things worse.

And absolutely none of that should matter to you as a player.

To my mind, this is the full-stop best digital card game in the world. Yes, even better than Slay the Spire. Even modded Spire. It is, essentially, a roguelike deckbuilder in which the bosses and elites are the decks of other players, giving it unprecedented enemy variety.

The build variety is oceanic (even when you don't use Aquatic items), the balance is very good, the content is deep and rich, the aesthetics are superlative. The balance of asymmetrical PVP against other players' decks and PVE against consistent computer-generated enemies gives you clear benchmarks without making each run a carbon copy.

Each of the game's six characters has a unique playstyle and signature mechanics, and you get to dip just enough into the others to inject variety into your runs.

Those $20 character DLCs? Most Steam players won't buy them and I don't blame them, but they are effectively a full expansion for a digital CCG in the form of a beautifully illustrated character and collection of cards. I can understand why they're worth that much even as I doubt they'll sell well as a result.

Even if you only get the base game, you'll still have access to three extremely fun characters and dozens or hundreds of hours of incredible gameplay.

The king is dead; long live the king!

Crusader Kings II has always been the most characterful of Paradox's grand strategy games, and among the most accessible as a result. Unfortunately, since the release of the Art of War DLC for Europa Universalis IV, which drastically improved the way army movement worked, CK2's system showed its age in the worst way. It had become, in the parlance of the game, Incapable.

But like an aging ruler in CK2, that system has died, and its vigorous successor looks to expand an already glorious realm. With the release of the Holy Fury DLC and its accompanying free patch, CK2 has caught up to EU4 in army movement. Performance improvements continue - if nothing else, due to extraneous courtiers dying in epidemics. And Holy Fury introduces amazing new features, including, for the first time since the base game released back in 2012, some attention to the titular Crusader Kings. Not to mention enhanced pagan reformation and random world generation options.

All these upgrades return the Paradox crown to CK2's brow. At least until the Megacorp DLC releases for Stellaris...

One of, if not the, best 4X games ever made, Endless Legend strikes a great balance between tried and true mechanics and experimentation.

Many tasks that would be tedious in another 4X, like worker management, are either abstracted or outright removed. In fact, the district system and linking of roads and trade routes was so well received they've shown up in a certain other 4X series.

Army sizes tend to remain smaller and more manageable than in most 4Xs, too, with an emphasis on elite troops with the best experience and equipment rather than huge stacks or map-carpeting single units. This helps the AI remain at least semi-competitive, since the tactical map stacks fight on is constrained enough to program robust routines for it. Sadly, while the AI is also good at the economic game, its grasp of war on the strategic map is too easily exploitable. If it's one of the best 4X AIs, that says as much about its competitors as about Endless Legend.

Instead of ever-expanding city micro, Endless Legend offers quests, ruins and minor factions to interact with. All more interesting, but they do eventually get repetitive. I also found the equipment system a rare downside, too fiddly for the scope of the game.

It's a beautiful game, though, with some of the best art design in the genre and high quality assets. Haunting music conveys the tone well, though it didn't stick with me enough for me to want the soundtrack.

Every faction plays differently, some, like the Cultists of the Eternal End (who can only have one city, but build it much larger than anyone else's), wildly so.

The DLC is also well worth your time. It introduces inventive new factions and mechanics (legendary structures, deeds and creatures) that fit nicely into the structure of the game.

The very best retro games present not the past as it was, but as it looks through the eyes of nostalgia. They are as good now as you remember the games you last played when you were eight being. They reject nothing new, but use it in the service of renewing what was old.

The very best retro games, in short, are Shovel Knight.

Essentially everything about this deliberately retro, but never archaic, platformer is executed perfectly. Movement and combat respond to your every tap of the d-pad. The limited color palette is used to brilliant effect, making each level distinctive and every actor on it stand out. The level design is so good, it's almost too good – it applies level design fundamentals about teaching you new mechanics so reliably that the only bad thing about the levels is that they all follow the same pattern.

The story is clichéd and the writing is merely clever, but even at its worst it never gets in the way, and there are some moments charming enough to make up for it. When the closest thing to a complaint you have about a platformer is that its writing is merely good, you know you're looking at a classic.

The handful of things that could be construed as complaints, along with a relatively short length, are all addressed by the free Plague of Shadows expansion. With more inventive mechanics, a more unusual story, and a campaign as long as the original, it cements Shovel Knight's place as the greatest platformer ever made.

It's hard to complain about repetitive, recolored enemies and relatively simple attack combos in a brawler. For better or worse, those are staples of the genre. By those standards, Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds actually does pretty well. There's decent enemy variety, especially as you reach later stages, and as you progress you can unlock longer and more varied combos.

But therein lies the problem. Unlock. This is one of those games in which you have a progression system, it's quite slow and grindy, and you're forced to choose between boring but powerful statistical upgrades and the special abilities that actually make the combat fun. I was able to get to a point where I both had enough damage that enemies didn't take an annoyingly long time to kill, and could deal that damage in interesting ways – but in exchange I had to completely ignore defense. To raise both to the levels I would expect in a brawler, I'd have had to double my play time on the earlier stages. Since I was already getting bored with the game by the time it started to become fun, I didn't have much incentive to press on.

Did I mention that those unlocks were for one character, and the game has several, each with their own abilities and dialogue?

Once you finally have enough unlocked that it feels like a complete game, Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds is a solid brawler. The sprites are large, detailed and cute, the enemies have interesting attack patterns, and locking your character and your opponents onto "tracks" in the foreground and background proves a clever way to smooth out the positional ambiguity that occasionally haunts the genre. It just can't make up for how long it takes before the game gets fun.

The Momodora series seems to make major leaps with each installment. The third game was the first to be sold commercially, and very much deserves it.

Graphically, it continues the progression from Momodora to Momodora 2, with more detailed backgrounds and larger enemies. The gameplay, too, follows on the previous title's advancements. This time you can choose between Momo and Dora, the protagonists of the first two entries, with Dora’s quest serving as the game’s hard mode. With either one, you collect items that allow you to use different powers against an array of monsters and bosses.

The level structure is something of a compromise between that of the first and second Momodora games. You have discrete levels, but can teleport back and forth between them at any save point. At the end of each, a boss awaits. Not only are these powerful enemies more frequent than in prior entries, they have much more interesting patterns and better hit detection. They're more fair, and much more fun.

While it lasts, this is a top-tier game, but it's extremely short. Though no platforming master, I was able to beat the easier scenario in under three hours. Still, that was under three hours of excellent action-platforming and some enjoyable light exploration, offered at a very reasonable price.

I can say a lot of good things about Legend of Dark Witch. Its Mega Man inspired level select remains as good of an idea as it was when, well, Mega Man first did it. Your character and the bosses she confronts have cute designs and nice animations. The fundamentals of action platforming are present.

But I can say a lot of bad things about it, too. The level selection may have taken inspiration from Mega Man, but the extremely bare-bones level designs clearly have not. The abilities you get from defeating the bosses might have, but from the worst examples in the Mega Man series – they’re almost useless outside of a few niche applications. The system by which you level up abilities over the course of a stage means that you have a huge incentive to defeat a boss on your first try, because additional attempts leave you with far less powerful attacks. Hardly desirable in the kind of game where learning a boss’s patterns is crucial to victory!

Worst of all is the progression system. You can permanently unlock new abilities using in game currency, but it's acquired at such a slow rate that you'd have to play dozens, if not hundreds, of times to obtain everything. I'm not clear on whether the higher difficulty levels are balanced around the expectation you'll have this stuff – much of which is comprised of rather boring statistical improvements – or not, but there's really no answer to that question that makes it sensible to have a progression system at all, much less such a glacially paced one.

I don't regret playing Legend of Dark Witch once, but it would have to be far longer or far better to justify how many times its developers seem to have expected you to play it.

Gnomoria does little to hide its inspiration. It's an attempt at a more accessible version of the legendarily complex Dwarf Fortress. If you've been following my reviews, you probably know that I place a fair amount of value on accessibility. Adding cute graphics and a, if not modern, at least mouse controlled interface are things I'm very much in favor of.

Unfortunately, the similarly stripped-down complexity ends up losing the unique charm of its inspiration, without actually making the game friendly to those not initiated in the Dorfish ways. Like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria is a game about systems and trying to keep them in equilibrium. Unlike Dwarf Fortress, it has systems simple enough to solve.

That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if Gnomoria's design moved further afield. But it retains the one save per world and glacial pace. As something to set running in the background and check in on intermittently, it can bring you some entertainment. But it's too slow and too punitive, for too few interesting decisions, to pour the kind of time into that it expects.

Relentlessly fair, endlessly charming, and hard as hell. That's Enter the Gungeon in a nutshell. This roguelite dungeon crawler has hundreds of items, weapons, enemies, bosses and rooms to explore, each seemingly cuter or cleverer than the last. It seems like all of them, including most of the ones that are meant to help you, can get you killed one way or another. Not once will you be able to make the excuse that those deaths are cheap.

Enter the Gungeon is the first legitimate challenger to the titan of its genre, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. It doesn't have quite as much content, but what it does have is top-notch presentation, a delightful sense of humor, and silky smooth gameplay. It's already in contention and expansion can only improve it.

Good as it is, Gungeon isn't perfect. With no early win condition and few runs capable of carrying you to victory, it isn't as accessible as Isaac, and probably never will be. A few other design decisions, like giving health rather than the opportunity to trade health for damage when you defeat a boss without getting hit, are also steps in the wrong direction. Overall, though, it's a delightful entry in this genre and well worth the time of anyone willing to brave its high difficulty.