Parasol Stars: The Story of Bubble Bobble III from Publisher United Games Entertainment and Developer Taito
New chapter in a retro classic. Different game modes give both a classic retro game experience or provide more modern quality of life features.
A classic platformer brought to current consoles. For anyone who remembers Bubble Bobble from the NES days, this is a new version of the game where Bub and Bob have been turned back into humans. For those who are new to the series, Bub and Bob were dragons who blow bubbles to capture enemies.
The duo is back, on an adventure to save their solar system. There are a total of 8 planets to save, each with their own theme and enemy types. All of the planets end in a boss fight that provides a bit of a challenge. If you can learn the pattern, you can make it out of the boss fights without losing a life. As expected the later levels and bosses become harder and more challenging the further you make it.
The Parasol is used for both offense and defense. It can attack enemies, shield you from attacks, allow you to float around the levels, and collect water drops for charged attacks. After attacking an enemy you can turn them into projectiles to attack other enemies or to collect items for points. The game kept the retro classic controls from when you only had 2 buttons; one for attack, one for jump, and the D-pad or thumbstick for movement. Mixing that with the colorful pixel art style and the repetitive soundtrack really hits the nostalgia sweet spot and makes it an easy game for anyone to pick up and play for any gamer, young or older.
There are 2 different game modes to play; Arcade and Standard Mode. Arcade mode is the way the game was intended to be played as this is the only mode you can unlock achievements in. Standard mode gives you a lot of other options including cheats codes for unlimited lives, invincibility, multi-jump, and a few others. This makes the game a lot easier and more accessible. There are also some quality of life additions to the game like saving and rewinding the gameplay.
Sadly, the game is a little short as it can be completed in a little over an hour depending on skill and has little to no story but that was pretty standard for most retro games.
There is a high score challenge for 1 or 2 players. There are also leaderboards for the challenges letting you sort between friends and global leaderboard. Depending on how much you care about the leaderboard this is where the game’s replayability comes in.
Just like the original games, there is local co-op for the modes and the 2 player high score challenge.
Overall, I really enjoyed the game and was definitely hit in the nostalgic feels. The cheat codes and quality of life improvements they added for Standard mode are always great to see in updated retro games.
Parasol Stars: The Story of Bubble Bobble III is available on Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Playstation. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Cat and Ghostly Road from Publisher Sometimes You and Developer BOV Games
Fairly standard point and click game play mechanics. Enjoyable story and characters. Very nice art with extras in “Cat Vision”.
This is a point-and-click game where you play a cat going on a journey to recover your master’s soul.
You start out as a cat walking around in the snow and get into some trouble. Your cries for help are heard by an artist who saves you and brings you in from the cold adopting you. All seems pretty normal, until one night when an evil spirit attacks the artist and takes his soul.
It’s time for you to go on a journey to defeat the spirit and recover your master’s soul and save his life.
Like most point-and-click games you will be going to different locations, picking up items, and combining them to see what you can make. You also have a special “Cat Vision” that lets you see into the spirit realm. You will use this ability very often to find items or clues to solve the puzzles. One of the nice quality of life additions present in this game is the option to press the LB Button to get a visual indicator (shining star effect) for items or objects you can interact with. This helps you identify what you can and can’t interact with. It also helps save time trying to figure out what you might’ve missed. We ended up spamming this very often when accessing a new area or just going back to a previous area when we got stuck. If you get stuck, remember to check to see what items you can combine.
There are some mini games and puzzles throughout the game that you need to complete before being able to move on. You get an unlimited amount of tries on these so there’s no need to worry if you fail them a few times. There is a sneaky one towards the end of the game that took us a few tries before figuring out the secret (Hint: Cat Vision). We ended up over-thinking some of the puzzles and making them harder than they needed to be. Remember, the game wants you to figure it out and the hint is normally nearby.
There are standard fetch quests, getting an item from here and bringing it to there to use it, that are standard for most point-and-click games.
You could tell the game was designed for a PC with the pointer that moves like a mouse. But they did a good job mapping it to a controller with one thumbstick moving the character and the other moving the pointer.
The one issue we had was that the movement speed felt a little slow for both the character and the pointer. We would have loved to see a movement speed option in the menu so we could speed that up.
Overall we enjoyed the game, the story, and the characters but the art style might have been the best part. The backgrounds look great and have a little added extra when using Cat Vision.
Cat and Ghostly Road is available on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, Windows and Nintendo Switch. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Hero Survival from Publisher Sometimes You and Developer Pigeon Dev Games
Rougelite shmup mashup featuring a host of halloween horrors. Beware the Flintlock weapon due to game breaking glitch.
Hero Survival is a roguelite game in which you fight off hordes of classic horror movie monsters. You go around killing monsters, picking up gold, and rinse and repeat all while trying to avoid the enemies and shooting them from a distance. The round is completed by staying alive until the timer ends. At the end of the round, you are presented with four options to choose from for different weapons or items that grant perks. You can only choose one of the four options, but if you don’t like any of them you do get one free reroll so you can try to get something better. If you still didn’t get something you want, you can reroll again, but it will cost you some of the gold we hope you picked up during the level.
While in the level you will be earning XP by killing enemies. When you level up you’ll get to pick one of three random perks. There are 3 different categories that the perks fall into. One grants a chance to spawn a bomb from a dead monster, another grants a chance to turn enemies into blocks of ice, and the third category has various upgrades for your standard weapons. There are also some one time or temporary perks that only last until you level up again and others that stay with your character until you die. All of the perks, weapons, and items seem to be RNG.
Every tenth round, a boss (the Devil) joins the monsters and chases you down. In the early levels he’s not too difficult but, as one would expect, he’s a bit more difficult in the later levels and deals quite a bit of damage. Depending on which perks you’ve picked up along the way and your current health, he could one-hit kill you.
You can hold up to 4 weapons at a time but they can be swapped out in between rounds if you find a better weapon. After enough runs you’ll have had a chance to try out the different options and will find your go-to weapons and pray to the RNG gods that they come up.
After beating the boss and completing the tenth round, you have the option of starting on a different map with different bonuses (i.e. harder enemies, more xp, and more loot) or replaying the same map. The new maps have a different look, but, sadly, they play the same way. It feels more like a different skin than a new map. We would have loved to see the maps leverage different mechanics to make them play a little differently. Like, the ice in the snow map could make you slide a bit, or the sand in the desert map could slow you down. This would have provided more of a reason to continue playing the new maps even after purchasing all of the characters and weapons and would’ve been some much appreciated variation in the gameplay.
Other than using the gold to reroll for better items or weapons, you can also use it to purchase new characters and new starting weapons. Each of the characters has different starting attributes/specs as do the weapons. A few of the characters appear to reference famous people/movie characters.
We did run into a game breaking glitch. All of our weapons stopped firing and couldn’t be reloaded. It looks like this issue happens when we have a “Flintlock” shotgun as a starting weapon and then add another one in between rounds. We have reached out to report this issue but at the time of this writing we have not heard back.
Overall we enjoyed the game for what it was and fell into the “just one more try” trap a bunch of times.
Hero Survival is on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition from Publisher and Developer New Blood Interactive, Nightdive Studios, Apogee Entertainment
A remake of a cult classic 90’s first person run-and-gun shooter. Adrenaline runs high with crazy fast movement speed and occasional frustrations from not being able to find the exit for the level. Recommend giving it a try and blasting some enemies with your super bark of destruction or Excali-bat today!
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is the updated remaster of the cult classic 1995 game Rise of the Triad. It’s a retro First Person Shooter that actually lets you pick from one of the five Members of the High-Risk United Nations Task-Force (codenamed H.U.N.T.). Each of the characters has different stats in movement speed, health (or hit points), and accuracy.
As expected it plays like a 90’s FPS run-and-gun which is both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. If you didn’t grow up playing these kinds of games you will get frustrated as there are no tutorials and there are hidden entrances all over the place. You end up getting stuck and have to just start spamming the A button against the walls hoping to find one of the hidden doors and open a path. Some of the levels feel like a maze where you keep going back and forth trying to figure out what you missed to find the exit. There is a map that is a little bit of help but there’s no mini map so you need to open the menu and check it all of the time or you risk having to run back and forth for something you missed. The story is about what you’d expect from a 90’s FPS game. There are bad guys you need to stop, that’s pretty much as deep as it gets.
As someone who didn’t play the original Rise of the Triad I was surprised by the crazy powers you get in this game, like being able to fly for a small amount of time, turning into a dog with a super bark, having a magic baseball bat (Excali-bat), becoming a god, and making people explode. The powers added some diversity to the game play and let you experiment with different play styles. Just like most good FPS run-and-guns, it’s all about the weapons. Along with the normal standard weapons like pistols and machine guns, they have some other interesting weapons with several of them firing different types of rockets.
Since it is a remake, we wish they would have added some quality of life improvements, like autosave. You read that right. It’s 2023 and there is no autosave, only manual saves, which is easy to forget to do nowadays as that has become a standard function in games for quite a while now. It’s frustrating when you forget about that and end up losing hours of gameplay. This happened to us as we stopped playing for a bit and when we reloaded, we realized that our last save was from hours ago. Another thing we would have loved to see is the option to change the controller sensitivity. It felt like it was set way too high which made some of the platforming parts much harder than they needed to be.
There are 4 different campaigns to play, with a total of 109 levels, giving you hours of gameplay. Just make sure you remember to save often (or at the very least, save before you stop playing). There is also the option to use the game’s original cheat codes if you remember them or you can look them up online. The game gets bonus points for letting you unlock achievements while using cheat codes. Unfortunately, the console remake did not include the multiplayer game type from the original game. But we hear the PC version does include this game type. Would love to see this come to consoles in a future title update.
Overall, it did hit that 90’s FPS nostalgia nailing the ever so classic look and feel of those games. The controller sensitivity was a challenge at times and made us feel like our character was speed skating on ice, but the option to play as different characters was a really cool option and we ended up playing as the character with the slowest movement speed to help offset some of the issues we were having with the controller sensitivity.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is available on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Windows. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip from Publisher and Developer Total Mayhem Games
Short but fun puzzle game in the We Were Here franchise. Good for an afternoon co-op experience with a friend.
“We Were Here Expeditions” is a new series in the “We Were Here” franchise. “The FriendShip” is the first game in this new series and is a smaller game than the previous We Were Here installments. It also has a smaller price tag at only $4 US. It can be completed in around 1-2 hours depending on how good your communication, teamwork, and trust are with your co-op partner. Going for perfect scores on the 3 puzzles will likely require more time and practice.
Like all of the other We Were Here games this is a 2 player co-op game. You will need to work together to solve puzzles. Communication is key in these games as you will be separated from your partner with each of you only seeing part of the puzzle or clues. Each of the characters has a walkie talkie that you use to communicate with each other. So as you might have figured out, a headset with a microphone is mandatory if you want any chance at solving the puzzles.
The opening cutscene finds our intrepid duo on a ship in a storm-tossed ocean when they hear a distress call over the radio. They head toward the call and land on an island with an abandoned amusement park. As you may have guessed, the amusement park is Friendship themed. You and your partner will need to work together, relying on your friendship to make your way through the park. After navigating through the beginning area that teaches you the basics of movement and interactions, you’ll board a small boat and go on a long ride reminiscent of a certain pirate attraction at a certain magical mousey amusement park.
There are 3 stops along the ride where you’ll both deboard and work together to solve puzzles and earn a bronze, silver, or gold ticket to upgrade your ship. You can keep retrying the puzzles as many times as you want in order to obtain a maximum score and the corresponding max level upgrade. The first puzzle is based on Communication, the second is based on Teamwork, and third is based on Trust. These 3 things are the central themes of the game.
After completing the game you are provided with a QR Code to scan which takes you to a site where you get a little video of your upgraded ship going through the end of the ride as well as your Friendship Results. This was a nice addition to the game. The video is different based on your performance and has the classic freeze frame souvenir photo that you see at most amusement parks. If your Friendship Results are less than perfect, this addition might be enough to make you want to replay the game to increase your results and see the different ship upgrades and endings. They also have a custom story relating your adventure in the amusement park that includes a lot of little details about what happened during each of the challenges.
Overall, as fans of puzzle games we enjoyed the game even though it was a little short and we look forward to seeing what the next game in the series has in store.
We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip is on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, and Epic Games. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Rabbids: Party of Legends from Publisher Ubisoft and Developer Ubisoft Chengdu
Rabbids are up to their usual hijinks in this minigame filled party game. Can be played solo or local co-op.
Rabbids: Party of Legends is a party game with a crazy story. If you’re familiar with the Rabbids you would expect no less. It has local co-op for up to 4 players and is better when played with friends. You’ll start off picking your mode, either Adventure or Party mode, select your Rabbid from the 22 available to start out with (another 23 can be unlocked by earning XP through gameplay). Each Rabbid has a different look but they play the same way. There is no difference in abilities, just pick the one you enjoy the most.
Adventure mode is the story part of the game where you will play through 50 minigames. Most of these are fairly repetitive standard issue minigames but there were a few that stood out as better and more enjoyable. You can either play solo or couch co-op. If you are playing solo, you will play against AI characters with 1 of 3 difficulty options; Easy, Normal, and Nightmare. We found the Easy and Normal difficulties to be pretty much the same but, Nightmare really ramps up the difficulty. It seems like all of the AI players go after you more often than they do each other making it basically a 3v1 whereas on the lower difficulties everyone goes after everyone in a more balanced way. If you are finding Nightmare a little too hard, you do have the option to change the AI difficulty between levels. Once you select the difficulty options it is set for everyone and cannot be changed mid-game. Some of the games are team based, matching you up with another player.
Party Mode lets you create a playlist by picking a bunch of levels or a single level that you want to practice. Not all of the mini games are available at the start, you will need to earn Enlightenment XP by completing levels to unlock them in Party Mode. This makes it very helpful if you missed an achievement or trophy since you can keep replaying a level until you complete the requirement to unlock your achievement or trophy.
Overall it’s a fun party game with crazy colorful characters but we do wish there was an online option as not everyone has people local enough to come over for couch co-op.
Rabbids Party of Legends is available on Xbox, Playstation, Ubisoft Store, and Nintendo Switch.
