Recent reviews by Maya

You never knew you liked fruit salad.

Welcome to another "negative gamer review".

There seems to be a game mechanic here somewhere that I don't understand, cos I keep getting crushed.
Love the art and music, and the core gameplay seems good. Would love to be able to beat it though.

Apparently this is a game others are referring to as "skills-based".
Most games have a good choice of difficulty levels: this does not, so I'm calling this game "skills-biased".

So many things done well in the NES/8-bit era, but also so many things that are poor, and downright infuriating.
Unfortunately, Alwa's Awakening takes both the good an the bad, and then adds a bit more bad to it.
People complain about the slow movement... and this I could live with... if the boss fights weren't so difficult.
The rest of the game is generally fairly straight-forward, but the boss fights ramp things up to level 13, and suddenly that slow movement complaint kicks in.

I dropped the game solely because I couldn't progress beyond one of the bosses.

Took me a few hours to admit it, but this game really does suck. A couple of the levels should never been allowed as race-tracks, they're ridiculous. Interestingly, they never show these crappy tracks in the trailers, cos wtf.

TL;DR: eh.

So many games that this draws from, but doesn't do anything well.
Of games I've played recently, Slime Rancher, Alba, My Time At Portia, Calico...
This game is confused at what it's striving to be, and that's it's biggest downfall. The melding of so many components comes together like Frankenstein's monster with a coat of colourful paint slapped on top - it's amazing that it's a game, but a lot of the functions of it are ugly and cumbersome. There are a few bugs as well as a lack of communication in what needs to be done in some areas.

Overall, I don't recommend it, but hope the devs learn from this, and decide to keep making games. I can see potential.

Kinda meh, to be fair.
Doesn't add anything to games I've played before, and all the characters are pretty cliche.
The supposed emotional side of the story didn't have any impact on me at all, and I was left feeling that if more time was spent on the characters' interactions, maybe this would have been more interesting.

Very difficult. Unless there is some mechanic in this game I'm misunderstanding.

I also tried Mission mode, and couldn't even accomplish the first mission.Like, wtf is this crap?

Umm, lolwut?
Don't we already have enough launchers and drm, 2k?

Just beat the game, and I can say it was really fun.

- It's bright and arcadey, and tracks, drivers, and vehicles are nice and varied.
- Handling of cars, and they way they perform is quite different - you'll find the one(s) you like soon enough.
- Physics are a bit janky, and the AI can sometimes be a punish, but the game has the perfect difficulty level (imho)
- Single-player is over in less than 8 hours, but the game does have 2 player split-screen (but no dedicated online mode).

Probably worth it on sale if you can get it for less than $10