Recent reviews by It Isn't Busbus!

If you enjoy Magicka and have a young child, this is the perfect game: charming, gorgeous textures, lots of content, easy to pick up and drop off. I was looking for something a little tougher (it's still very easy even on Hardcore) so it's not for me, but it might be for you!

Tried it single player shortly after it came out, and again recently with the release of co-op. Both times I was taken in by the crumbling beauty of the art and the charm of all the procedural creature animations, but ultimately stopped playing because progressing was tedious and didn't respect my time.

To move between areas, you need to pass through gates which only open if you have a certain amount of "karma." You gain karma when you successfully sleep after filling your belly, and you lose it when you die, so in order to progress you need to have an uninterrupted string of good runs, each of which increases the scarcity of food. Unfortunately, the game likes to throw bad runs at you, seemingly at random: a lizard lurking near the entrance to the next area that snaps you up before you can react, a rainstorm destroying the safehouse you were sleeping in and forcing you to make a dangerous trek to a different one, predators swarming around food sources.

I'm fine with a game being difficult and unforgiving; I've got plenty of soulslikes and traditional roguelikes in my library, and I'm okay with being punished for things that are my fault, so I can improve. Rain World doesn't feel like that. There are so many instances of failures due to events that seem completely out of the player's control, and so much progress lost when these failures happen, that it felt like banging my head against a wall. The great setting and cute slugcat couldn't save it.

Ember Knights is essentially an indie-er multiplayer-capable Hades with a cute fantasy aesthetic. If that sounds good, stop reading this review and buy it, you'll have a great time.

Ember Knights is structurally identical to Hades: pick a weapon that defines your run, go through four worlds with riffs on their same bosses and minibosses to build predictability while keeping things fresh, choose between two possible outcomes for the next room, and use the currency you gained during a run to buy swappable upgrades in a number of categories. If you liked that gameplay and progression system, you'll feel right at home here.

Ember Knights' combat is a little slower and more methodical, with more emphasis on charged attacks and commitment and less on dodging, which I definitely appreciate. Character upgrades found during a run depend less on your weapon and instead rely more on your chosen skills and elemental effects, which feels more like I'm making big meaningful decisions during my run instead of determining my all behaviors before I even step out of the gate with my weapon choice. Multiplayer is well executed and fun, with a well-behaved camera and clearly-delineated effects between each player.

This is a charming and beautiful game with a lot of good ideas, that was regrettably spoiled for us because of its inconsistent and unsatisfying difficulty. We're no stranger to difficult games - we have soulslikes, Cuphead, and roguelikes under our belts - so just BEING difficult isn't a problem. The WAY that Young Souls does its difficulty is frustrating though.

Broadly, enemies in Young Souls fall into two camps: enemies that flinch, and enemies that don't. You can deal with the former variety however you want; just keep attacking, and they won't be able to trike back. The latter is where the game falls apart. Enemies' attacks come out extremely fast, and it's rarely possible to sneak in an attack before your enemy is able to respond and punish you, whether you're attacking from neutral or trying to punish them on the wind-down from their combo. To make matters worse, lots of enemies block attacks from all sides, so even doing that is impossible.

This means that you need to start on the defensive and land a parry in order to open an enemy up. Parries have very narrow and awkward timing and felt finicky throughout our playthrough. To make matters worse, many enemies, especially bosses, require multiple parries in short succession to break them open (a la Sekiro's posture system), so you need to lean entirely on this weak system for several of the most difficult fights in the game. This was brutally unfun, not just because it was difficult but because it was unpleasant to interact with.

There's a lot to like here - the art direction is fantastic, the illustrations are great, and there are tons of fun characters to meet and goodies to find. Unfortunately, the way it's designed its difficulty makes that a slog, especially in the latter half, and I would take back the time I spent finishing it if I could.

This would be a great "My First Roguelite" to introduce someone to the genre. It's got all the usual things: multiple resources to juggle on a run, routes to plan with incentives, discoverable characters and items, and development between runs. The gameplay and visuals are simple, well-crafted, and engaging, and it's a great time throughout, especially in co-op.

HOWEVER, as other reviews have said, there's a dearth of content, especially after beating the final boss. Discovering new things mostly boils down to variations on a theme: fire bullet in standard and piercing, ice bullet in standard and piecing, reloadable bomb in fire and ice, et cetera. Levels are in the same order and present the same few configurations every run, and bosses are always the same with no variants. Runs began to feel the same after the first half-dozen. Our 6h of playtime felt like enough time to spend with the game.

Pick this up on sale and play it with someone who's never played a roguelite before, and you'll have a fantastic time.

Voidigo is the best new twinstick roguelite I've seen in a long time. It has, in no particular order:

- Really clever character designs. Your character selection drastically changes how you play and how you value pickups. Playing Dr. Fusion (the literal sun, in a mechanical suit, wearing sunglasses and board shorts) means that your projectiles now orbit around you at fixed distance rather than shooting forward. The other characters are similarly inventive and playing each one is a blast.
- Fun and lovingly designed weapons and powerups. Most of the things you wield are alive, and wriggle around in your hands with as much character as your actual character. Find a legless skeletal trumpeter who fires jiggly music notes, clears the bouncing bones out of its trumpet when it reloads, and wheezes exhausted when it runs out of ammo. Just like the characters, the level of quality throughout the set is consistently high, and they all feel great to use.
- Boss hunting mechanic. Scattered around the map are Beacons that need to be activated. Activating two beacons summons the boss, but it can't be killed until ALL of the beacons are activated. Picking when to engage the boss and when to run from it (and having it chase you around as you hunt for the last beacon so you can kill it) is a mechanic I haven't seen before in this genre and makes engaging with the bosses feel relevant throughout the level instead of just the end.
- Craftable pets. You can spend your currency between runs to semi-randomly build weird little guys armed with the weapons you find. They show up as recruitable companions in your runs and talk nonsense to each other in the hub area. It's a really cute mechanic and my hub is getting really full of them, please send help, I can't bear to banish any of my deformed murderous children.

Overall Voidigo is already a polished and engaging product, despite still being in EA as I write this review. It's obviously learned lessons from the other major games in the genre, and in my estimation is just as good as Nuclear Throne and better than Enter the Gungeon (mainly because it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of having mostly boring guns, come on...). Don't miss it!

FIGHT KNIGHT was a heck of a ride, and was obviously made with a ton of love. The art and characters are charming, the punching is fun, and the puzzles are puzzly enough to provide a nice break from the punching. It gets very messy towards the end (it starts getting VERY difficult at the ice/fire level and makes your eyes bleed in the graveyard and computer levels), but finishes strong and is ultimately a very pleasant and unique experience.

A perfect candidate for a mixed review. Shatterline looks and plays just fine, and the devs seem dedicated and responsive. However, the game they've made is aggressively derivative: there's nothing here that you haven't seen in other arcade shooters in any area of its design, from the guns to the enemies to the operators. It was easy to forget that I wasn't just playing Destiny... which is also now free to play. It's competently made and absolutely not bad, but if it lacks a sense of its own identity at this level of polish, I doubt it's going to suddenly find one now.

It Takes Two is a thoroughly well-made platform adventure that takes you and your companion through the dreamlike ruins of the protagonists' marriage. It's ideal for a casual gaming couple: there's nothing that will blow your socks off in either mechanics or narrative if you're a deeply researched gamer, but it's sweet and light and entertaining, with excellent pacing and plenty of gameplay twists to keep the experience fresh. If you enjoyed Brothers, It Takes Two is a fine successor and hits all the same buttons.

Star Renegades is stylishly presented and has lots of interesting ideas, none of which are well executed.

Good:
+ Initiative system is a cool and thought-provoking mechanic. Keeping pressure on enemies by hitting them repeatedly with a combination of fast and heavy attacks to push their turn further and further back is satisfying once you can figure it out, and having to pay attention to initiative to confirm your crits and avoid your enemies' is fun to do.
+ Lovely pixel art with diverse characters and stylish animations.
+ Heroes feel unique once they've levelled up, and getting your group cooperating to bring down big enemies feels rewarding.

Bad:
- Opaque UI and poor explanation of critical mechanics. It's very difficult to access the information you need to figure out what you're about to do. Desperately needs an "end turn" button, and for heroes not to immediately use instant abilities as soon as they're activated; as it stands sometimes you'll make a permanent mistake while trying to figure out if your combo will even work.
- Massive difficulty spikes and unforgiving gameplay. Area bosses are MUCH more difficult than regular enemies, and you need to come into them in tip-top shape if you want to survive. That means any mistake you make anywhere in the prior level is potentially a game-ender. The game needs you to take every fight you can get to level up, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to make those mistakes.
- Tone mismatch and cringy writing. The story is about multiverse-hopping fascists subjugating entire realities, and the art is a pretty serious grimy neon blend... but both the heroes and the villains speak entirely in gags and JRPG tropes. Maybe this is for someone, but it's definitely not for me.
- Unnecessary mechanics. Different damage types are rare and have marginal effects. There's a Shadow of War-like randomly generated miniboss mechanic but you're never able to really manipulate it or capitalize on it.
- The worst one: It's just tedious. Combat is slow and technical, so individual battles last a while. Runs can be hours long. Enemies aren't very diverse, especially in early levels. Low-level heroes have basically one thing that they do for the entire first planet, and heroes in general have linear progression, so using the same hero will feel the same. The end result is a long, repetitive-feeling experience, but one that still severely punishes you for making mistakes. It's like creeping along in rush hour traffic; nothing is happening that will keep you engaged, but you still have to keep all your focus on it or you'll have an expensive accident.

I'd love to see some of these mechanics in a more streamlined, focused experience. This ain't it.