Recent reviews by arts&crafts

ciggy

Pretty bare bones and short but not bad if you are looking for a quick PS2 era platformer. Took me about 6 hours to 100%. For $5 or in a bundle, I give it a thumbs up.

There are too many damn Merlin Trials.


Disclaimer! This game is very poorly optimized, it runs very poorly on a 3080/5600X at 1440p (no raytracing, with DLSS) so I would recommend waiting for some patches if you are not a big Harry Potter fan. I am not going to re-review later so I will put this disclaimer so you know what you are getting into.

If you are a big Harry Potter fan, this is a really great game. Hogwarts is amazing and I do wish you spent more time there, you spend maybe half the time at Hogwarts, maybe less. The rest of the world follows the basic open world Ubisoft formula and could definitely use some work in a an expansion or sequel as it gets very repetitive.

For the game play, I would call this an RPG only loosely. Yes you are "role playing" a wizard but the actual game shares very little with the RPG genre. You have no stats except "Offence" and "Defence" which is a number that can only be altered by changing your gear to one with a bigger number. There is a "skill tree" but the skills only slightly alter the different spells (make explosion bigger for example) and have no effect on how you play the game and you can not make different "builds" with the skill tree, so everyone will be playing the game the same way, maybe using different spells more than others. I would classify the game as an open world adventure game more in the Assassins creed category than an actual RPG.

Overall though, the game is pretty fun and aside from the technical issues, the game play is pretty sound. It is a must play for any potter fans and a pretty solid open world adventure game for non- Harry Potter fans looking for more in the genre. I would say, if you arent a Harry Potter fan at all or have very little knowledge of the Harry Potter world, I would wait for a sale. The best parts of the game are the callbacks, lore and expertly crafted Hogwarts castle that wouldnt hit as hard if you are coming into the franchise blind.

Fun, peaceful line based puzzle game. Short and sweet. Well worth the $1 or so it is priced at.

A unique take on the hexcell formula. About 2 to 3 hours of puzzling, not too difficult. Given its reasonable price point, I would recommend. If you are looking for something similar with more content and significantly more difficult, I highly recommend Tametsi.

Hexcells on crack.

A very interesting game. Not a metroidvania in the slightest, I dont know why I thought it was going to have some elements of one. Its more or less an adventure game.. with some combat. A lot of the game is in the story and environmental story telling. Its essentially Tron. If you are interested in the art style, a Tron-like story and a banging soundtrack, definitely check it out.

A nice compact metroidvania with an appealing art style and grappling hooks!

The only con I can think of is lack of fast travel which makes backtracking a real slog.

A good indie game along the lines of Zelda/Darksiders. The combat and bosses are pretty basic, dont expect a "soulslike". The only real negative is the lack of a map, but luckily the game isn't too big so its only marginally annoying.

The best Castlevania clone out there and better than a lot of actual Castlevania games. A must play for any "metriodvania" fan.