What do you mean “you used up all of your allowable puns in that headline”? Developer Thomas Young gets to make two whole games full of dad jokes and I only get those two words? Sigh, fine. Let’s talk about that developer’s latest game, Molecano (Free), and let’s do it while leaving the groan-worthy word play at the door. Well, not all of the word play. Wouldn’t be able to talk much about this game without discussing that. Oh no, I did it again. Alright, on to the body of the review before I get my bosses any more steamed than they already are.

I’m quietly a bit of a fan of Thomas Young. Somehow I didn’t really play any of his games until they came to the Switch, but once I had my first taste I knew I had a new developer to follow. The Super Fowlst games are tricky in all the right ways. The Dadish Quadrilogy (IT’S A WORD!) are rad, cute, and funny platformers that can get devilishly challenging, especially Daily Dadish. This fellow makes some cheerful little action games that can make you want to yank your hair out. I guess that’s his deal. But wait, what’s this? His next game isn’t an action game at all? It’s a word game?

In hindsight, we should have seen it coming. Those end of level gags in Dadish demonstrate that this fellow is something of a wordsmith. So here we are with Molecano. Good title. Simple, short, rolls off the tongue. Shows up well in a web search. Makes you want to ask what the deal is. What is the deal with that? A mole and a volcano, presumably? Why would they be bedfellows? I must find out. No, I am not trying to stretch things out because a word game doesn’t really have a ton to talk about. Maybe that’s what you’re doing, and you’re just projecting.

Projects! Let me tell you about a project. Molecano has over four hundred levels to play, and apparently more are on the way. I trust Thomas Young on that, he’s never been one for idle promises. But even if he never added anything else, four hundred stages is a whole lot of stuff to do. On each of those stages, you’re trying to get your cute mole (or whatever other character you’ve selected) to the foods scattered about. The problem is a classic one we all know too well: the floor is lava. You’ve got some letters down at the bottom of the screen, and they’ll work as well as anything for platforms. But this is a picky volcano, friends. It won’t allow platforms of nonsense. Those platforms have to be proper words. Spell them out, rotate as needed, and create some paths for our hungry hero.

You only use a set amount of words to solve each stage, though. You also have to connect your words, and Scrabble rules apply so you can’t overlap carelessly. Sometimes there are bits blocking longer words, and you have to use at least three letters on each word. You might have to first pick up keys sometimes to unlock other areas of the stage. The interesting hook here is that you really have to consider how long each word is because it’s not always a case where bigger is better. It really depends on the stage layout, where the foods and keys are, and how you want to reach all of that. That said, in the absence of any other factors, longer words are certainly more desirable. Those will earn you coins, and those coins can be exchanged to unlock new characters. Some will be familiar to fans of this developer’s previous works.

This is all wrapped in a very charming presentation, which is another hallmark of this developer. It’s cute, colorful, and you’d have to be a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon villain to hate how it looks and sounds. Even then, I think Skeletor goes for it. Shredder too. Mumm-Ra, probably not. He was always a bit of a curmudgeon. Cobra Commander yes, Serpentor who cares. Ridiculous usurper. The point is that this game’s mechanics aren’t particularly unique but the package they’re delivered in help the game stand out. Throw in the aforementioned bonkers amount of stages to clear, and it’s easy to see why this is worth the fantastic price of… free?

I just picked my monocle up off the floor and cleaned up the seltzer I spewed all over. Yes, Molecano is free. It will throw an ad at you now and then, and if you don’t like that you can pay a highly reasonable $5.99 to remove those ads forever. I think that’s a fair business proposition, so I’m not going to waste too many more column inches talking about it. Try the game out for free, and if you like it you can rest easy knowing it is certainly worth the six bucks to keep King Robert and Austin the Butler away.

I’ve always been a sucker for good word games, and Molecano is exactly that. You get a vibrant and frankly adorable presentation, an absurd number of stages to play, mechanics that are incredibly familiar but have that slight twist to make them feel fresh, and a monetization model that’s hard to argue with. If, like me, you enjoy flexing your vocabulary muscle (I think that’s called a brain, Shaun), then I strongly recommend helping this little mole get some chow post-haste. There, can I have my puns back?

When Remnant 2 from Gunfire Games was announced, a friend of mine kept trying to get me to play the first game. I ended up liking Remnant: From the Ashes quite a bit when I finally played it on Nintendo Switch for review. Read my review of the port here. Having experienced the first game in handheld mode on Nintendo Switch, I was hoping Remnant 2 would be fine on Steam Deck from the get go. I’ve been playing it for review on both Steam Deck and Xbox Series X, and while the latter is massively better, I’m impressed with Remnant 2 on Steam Deck right now after a few patches. Remnant 2 on Steam Deck has improved a lot post-launch, but it has also got me to question Valve’s Steam Deck Verified program. I’ll get to that in a bit, but Remnant 2 on Steam Deck despite its issues, has been a joy to play solo and with friends after some compromises.

While this review will focus on Remnant 2 on Steam Deck and the PC port, I wanted to also cover why I love Remnant 2 so far. It feels like a huge improvement over the first game and I hope more games take inspiration from its co-op setup. Playing with friends is super simple in Remnant 2, and it is something I hope other developers take inspiration from for their own co-op systems. Remnant 2 itself is a big upgrade visually, in its music, and variety. The post-launch updates are changing up things already, but I can safely recommend Remnant 2 if you enjoyed the first game or if you just want to try a polished blend of third-person shooters and soulslikes. It also keeps things fresh making multiple playthroughs fun with how much changes, and how much customization is available.

I’ve included a screenshot of the Remnant 2 Steam graphics options, but I set everything to low on Steam Deck and opted for Intel XeSS upscaling set to performance. AMD’s FSR in Remnant 2 is not good at all. With everything set to low, 720p (or lower while testing), and Intel XeSS, I could get the game to run at 30fps with some drops. This varies a lot based on the location you’re in. Dense areas aren’t terrible, but things become hard to see. Around launch day, these settings resulted in multiple drops into the low 20s or even below regardless of the location, so the current state is an improvement, albeit a small one. For a Steam Deck Verified game around launch, Remnant 2 needs more optimization. Given how it runs on consoles with a low internal resolution, I’m not surprised though.

While discussing Remnant 2 Steam Deck performance, I want to emphasize how much better the overall experience is right now versus day one. Not only does Steam Cloud work now, the game is actually playable online with friends. I couldn’t get online co-op to work at all until a recent patch. One thing to note about patches is that it takes a while to actually patch the game once said patch downloads. I wanted to see how Remnant 2 on Steam Deck would feel on the SD card, and I installed it to my Sandisk Extreme card. Patches still take an hour or so to install. Keep that in mind.

The more I played Remnant 2, the more I enjoyed it even on Steam Deck. This is a game I see myself replaying for a while thanks to the different builds possible even from the start. It did make me wonder about recommending Remnant 2 specifically to someone on Steam Deck and not something else. When I do Steam Deck reviews, I aim to try and help many potential buyers figure out if something is worth it or not on Steam Deck. In this case, I absolutely recommend Remnant 2 on Steam Deck with the big caveat about its visual cutbacks to get a decent frame rate. As an addition to your main PC where it likely runs better, Remnant 2 will be great to quickly dip in and out for sessions where you do a small area or just play with friends for a bit.

Remnant 2 on Steam Deck offers the ability to use gyro controls thanks to Steam Input. This is not available on either console as far as I’m aware, which is a big advantage for the game on Steam in general. It made going back to the Xbox Series X version harder since aiming is worse there without gyro. Steam Input continues to impress, and after some tweaking and getting used to the visual cutbacks, Remnant 2 feels right at home on Steam Deck. The ability to play on the go is also a bonus for the Steam Deck since there is no Switch port, and I don’t see Remnant 2 hitting the current Switch. It might be a good game for the next Switch though.

Over the last few months games like Sony’s The Last of Us Part I being a mess on PC and not great on Steam Deck even today made me question Valve’s Steam Deck Verified program. When Remnant 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 got Verified, you’d assume they run fine and don’t have issues. Remnant 2 right now runs a lot better than it did when it was branded Verified by Valve. I think it still shouldn’t be marked as Verified though. Valve should make developers implement a good default graphics preset for Steam Deck for something to be Verified.

A lot of this review talking about compromises reminds me of when I write about demanding games getting Switch ports. I feel like we are getting close to that stage for games that only release on current generation consoles with their own visual cutbacks to run at a good frame rate on those more powerful systems. Remnant 2 definitely got me to think about how certain upcoming games might be on Steam Deck.

Right now, I’d recommend Remnant 2 itself for sure. I love the gameplay, co-op, soundtrack, and improvements over the first game. I do not love the visual downgrade to get it running decently on Steam Deck though. Since it is Steam Deck Verified, Valve likely wants people to buy it to play on Steam Deck, but just be prepared for some tinkering to get it running at an acceptable frame rate. I featured Remnant 2 as one of the best new games to play on Steam Deck in 2023, and I’m expecting it to be on my end of year list as well. While I’ll stick to the Xbox Series X version for my main playthrough, I’m looking forward to checking out the DLC and playing more with friends on Steam Deck in the coming weeks. Hopefully Gunfire Games can optimize it further for Steam Deck soon.

Remnant 2 Steam Deck Score: 4/5

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Stone Story RPG (Free) is a very carefully crafted game. Every bit of it feels deft and deliberate, both good and bad. It catches the eye immediately with its distinctive ASCII art, particularly when it starts moving. The mysterious nature of the game evokes things like A Dark Room, and that’s a good place to be. What starts off as a very low-interaction idle-ish game quickly becomes a different beast as it opens up. But in the same way its friendlier points feel cleverly implemented, so too do its flaws. An oddity, to be sure. How does it all work out on balance? Let’s find out together.

I really need to work on my intro paragraphs. Well, nothing to be done about it now. Stone Story RPG has been around on PC via early access for a pretty long time now. Just as the game starts with a single stone and expands considerably from there, so too did this game grow over the years, finally achieving a state that its developer decided was worthy of being called a release version. That early access period means that the developer has received a lot of player feedback, and that presents an excellent opportunity to polish the heck out of an idea. Stone Story RPG is certainly that. Other than a few clumsy bits of the interface that might be a result of not being designed first as a touchscreen game, I don’t think I can find a single issue with the game that isn’t intentional.

The story starts with a stone. That stone is actually apparently the head of a person, a person we shall call hero. Or heroine. Or Dave. Whatever you like. That person collects more stones in the area around them, and finds the stones make for useful weapons against the creatures roaming about. Soon they find another resource, and that opens up things that can be crafted with resources. Weapons, armor, accessories, and chests can be found as well. The most important thing you’ll find are special stones which grant major new features and serve as the McGuffin you’re chasing for much of the adventure. Most are in the possession of large, angry, hungry things. Poke them or zap them as needed to pry those stones out of their grubby appendages.

As you play, the game gets a lot more complicated. Not terribly so, mind you. But you’ve got crafting systems, gear with elemental attributes, the ability to set up various load-outs, and more. You’ll discover new areas and run into puzzles you’ll have to solve using items. Naturally, lots of things to kill and goobers to collect. Before long you’ll have to make use of elemental weaknesses to have any serious chance of success, and you’ll find yourself flipping gear on the fly to collect resources and take advantage of weaknesses. Rather busy for an idle game, I’d say. And you absolutely need to keep your gear at its best. Whether by crafting, lucky drops, or picking things up from the shopkeeper, if you don’t have the right tools you’ll end up banging your head against the wall.

When things are going smoothly, Stone Story RPG is both highly compelling and a ton of fun. You’re discovering new things, new systems and mechanics are opening up, you’re knocking out quests, and you’re feeling clever for getting around various obstacles. I would say that the majority of the game’s several hours of runtime are very enjoyable. I’m going to start talking about the game’s issues soon, but I want to stress before going into them that you should not let them stop you from trying the game. It’s very good, and just watching it move is a bit of a magic trick. When it heats up and you’re juggling gear sets, barely defeating a boss thanks to your strategy, it’s tense in all the right ways. Go download it, it’s free. You have nothing but time to lose.

Okay, time to talk a little turkey. Stone Story RPG is a free game on mobile. It is not a free game on PC. There isn’t a single IAP that unlocks the game, either. A quick glance at the list of in-app purchases in the App Store shows things like bags of crystals that go up to fifty bucks, single weapons that cost ten bucks, and of course the obligatory DEALS that probably aren’t very good deals at all. This game would like you to pay something, which is fair. It isn’t asking for that thirty bucks flat that it wants over on Steam. How you feel about that is up to you. But the type of monetization used here forces me to really consider how it presents things.

For example, the game can be pretty grindy if you find yourself with inadequate gear or insufficient resources. Is that part of the natural design, or is it like that to nudge the player into making purchases or watching the daily incentivized ad? Is the boss difficult because conquering tough enemies is fun, or is it difficult because it wants you to buy the fancy weapon the shopkeeper is featuring? And gosh, those fancy weapons. The game really sells you on them, hard. They make your character look so much cooler, and they’re going to solve a lot of problems for you. Now, to the game’s credit, it doesn’t try to sell you anything for the first little while. And you genuinely don’t need to buy anything to beat the game’s main story, though you might have to do some grinding from time to time. But when a game is being this aggressive with its salesmanship, I just can’t help but feel a little put off.

I think Stone Story RPG is a game any fan of RPGs or mysterious adventures should give a bit of their time to. The presentation is very cool thanks to those ASCII graphics, and the soundtrack is almost as enchanting. It surprises in ways that some of my favorite games do, and it’s extremely clever in how it peels back its layers. You can play through the whole thing without paying a cent, and that’s a lot of quality entertainment for nothing. That being said, the way the game tries to sell its IAPs feels just a little… it feels like too strong of a word, but ‘repulsive’ is what immediately came to mind. Like having a slick dream and one of the characters pulls you aside to remind you that you’re asleep. There’s an illusion being woven here, and the game has to break it to try to sell you something, anything. A chip in a grand boulder of a game.

Just like when Jared wrote about it for Game of the Week, I was in two minds about reviewing Red Nexus Games’ pachinko roguelike Peglin (Free). On PC, Peglin is available as an early access game, which means it will keep getting new content or fixes as it heads to its full release. On PC, that happens quite a bit with indies, in fact even Baldur’s Gate 3 which I’ve been obsessed with for over a week, was an early access launch in 2020 before it hit 1.0 recently. Peglin is in early access on mobile and it has already seen a few notable updates bringing in new characters and more. I was planning on waiting for Peglin to hit 1.0 on PC and mobile before reviewing it, but I’ve been playing it daily again, so why not write about how it is in its current state? This Peglin early access review will be updated when the game hits 1.0.

Peglin is a “pachinko roguelike” and it involves a lot of elements from both kinds of games. There are a lot of balls, pegs, luck, charming designs, catchy music, and more as you try to aim to get as much damage by hitting pegs as one of many orbs while trying to survive. These orbs and pegs have their own interactions, and there’s a lot of RNG or luck involved depending on how you aim and what’s on the board. This affects your attack to damage enemies. Your aim is to progress to the end of the area you’re in. Even selecting the next path on your map is done by launching yourself as an orb into one of many paths on the bottom of the screen.

These paths range from events to treasure chests and even mini bosses in addition to general battles. In addition to your starting orbs, you collect loads throughout your run while also gaining relics and more. Everything changes up how you will approach the next encounter because you could have something damaging enemies further away, something that gives you more critical attacks, or something that heals you. The first many runs will be a learning experience as you try and find your bearings in Peglin. This is another reason I recommend finishing the opening area which is free to try on mobile. That will tell you everything you need to know about whether Peglin is for you or not.

Peglin could do with more variety in its unlocks, but said variety isn’t as accessible early on. These kinds of games benefit from throwing unlocks at you to keep you invested, and Peglin’s structure and difficulty don’t help. Neither does the reliance on luck, but that isn’t something I knock it for. Peglin 1.0 would be a lot more accessible with some quality of life improvements and accessibility options for newcomers. In a lot of ways, Peglin reminds me of the early game of The Binding of Isaac where you see tons of weapons or modifiers, but struggle to make much progress making you feel like you are wasting your time. The difference is that the gameplay in Peglin hasn’t even remotely stopped being fun while I did tire of Isaac before its DLC at one point.

Having played Peglin on my iPhone (with touch and a Razer Kishi V2), iPad (with a controller and with touch), and Steam Deck, Peglin right now is great on all of them, but I’d try it out on every platform if I were you before investing time into them since there is no cross platform syncing. If you do play on Steam, you can play at a higher frame rate as well and sync to your Steam Deck if you have one through Steam Cloud. The Steam Deck version even supports 120fps while docked over DisplayPort, which is how I’ve been playing it when at home.

In its current state, Peglin on iOS has almost every feature I want. The major miss is the lack of iCloud save support. As with all my reviews mentioning iCloud save support missing, I need to specify that sometimes the developer does implement it, but iCloud itself isn’t too reliable. The only times it has worked flawlessly for me are with Apple Arcade games or Feral Interactive releases. Cross platform syncing seems to be out of the question though. Barring that, a feature I’d like, but one that isn’t essential, is the ability to play in portrait mode on iPhone. Peglin is the perfect portrait game, but I understand that it would require a lot of work for the interface and to make things readable.

On modern iOS devices, Peglin is a 16:9 game so there will be black bars depending on your device. It runs very smoothly on my iPhone 11 and iPad Pro (2020). You can enable a battery saver option if you’d prefer to conserve power while running at a lower frame rate. Barring that, Peglin does have controller support on iOS. I used my Razer Kishi V2 on iPhone and DualSense controller on iPad without any issues. The button prompts changed immediately depending on my input.

Peglin has a few quality of life features like being able to speed up movement and gameplay, but I hope we eventually get one that lets you skip the animations and do things even quicker. The speed up option also wasn’t implemented fully at launch on iOS, but now it offers the same 3x option as the PC version.

One of the advantages to Peglin on mobile, is that it has a very generous free trial available. Peglin is a free to start game with a one time unlock in app purchase. If you aren’t sold on it, I urge you to try the game and see how you feel in the first area. If you do like it, the unlock price is about half of what the PC version costs making the mobile version an even better option with how the pick up and play nature of the game suits portable play. It also helps that the iOS version is superb, and only really is missing iCloud save syncing.

Having never played Peggle before, Peglin has been a ton of fun even with all the luck and RNG involved. It may not be for everyone, but even in its current state, I recommend trying Peglin on iOS. The free to start model means you can try it out for yourself and see how you like it. I was sold after a few runs, and have not grown tired of it even months after launch. I’ve even started playing it on Steam Deck as a break from other games like I do with Vampire Survivors there. I can’t wait to see where Peglin goes when it hits 1.0.

Early Access review score: 4.5/5*

We’re getting dangerously close to being two decades removed from the launch of the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable. It was an exciting time. Would Sony do to Nintendo in handhelds what it had done in home consoles? What kind of wild games would arise from the beefy specs of the PSP and the unusual features of the DS? An exciting battle where everyone ultimately won, as far as I’m concerned. But I want to look at one micro-skirmish in those early years, because it is from this relative footnote that the inspiration for this game, Gravitas! ($0.99), was born. Let’s talk about Meteos.

Just a couple of years before the launch of this epic generation of handhelds, another major event went down. SEGA, having had its latest console’s clock thoroughly cleaned by the PlayStation 2 (a fate it would not suffer alone), decided to drop out of the hardware business and shift to being a third party. A pivotal time for the company, and one that would see a number of its key developers depart the company for various destinations. One such person was Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the producer of games like SEGA Rally Championship, Space Channel 5, and Rez. At the time a relatively young producer, he was fond of sick dance beats and raver culture, aspects that he had increasingly been incorporating in his projects.

When he left SEGA, he decided to start up his own independent company with a number of other former SEGA developers. Named Q Entertainment, its first order of business was to develop a puzzle game for each of the upcoming handhelds. Not the same one, either. Each handheld would get its own unique game from top to bottom. For the PlayStation Portable, Q Entertainment made Lumines, a rhythm-focused falling block puzzler that saw players rotating and placing pieces to match colors as the screen removed them based on the tempo of the constantly-changing music. The Nintendo DS received Meteos, a very unique puzzler designed by Masahiro Sakurai (Kirby and Smash Bros. creator) that used touch controls to manipulate falling blocks to make matches, which would send them rocketing into the sky and, if they had enough lift, clearing them.

Both fine games, and both did quite well. One did a lot better than the other, however, and to the victor go the spoils. Lumines received several sequels and a handful of ports, and can easily be bought on modern platforms today. As for Meteos? A somewhat ill-conceived sequel knocked it off the rails almost immediately, and it received only a couple more releases of any kind before effectively falling off the map from 2010 on. And look, I love Lumines. But I also love Meteos, and I’ve been hoping for it to make a comeback of any kind for a very, very long time. Preferably in a form closer to the original than that sequel.

Well, I don’t know if Meteos is ever coming back. And clearly, I’m not the only one who misses it. Developer Drew Smith has more initiative than I do, because he seems to have gotten tired of waiting and just went out and made his own Meteos. I’m not going to sugar-coat things too much here. Gravitas! wholesale borrows its mechanics from the original Meteos, almost to a tee. Each Phase sees you trying to send a set number of blocks off the top of the screen within a certain amount of time. You can slide pieces up and down each column (and not left and right), and matching three or more of the same pieces either vertically or horizontally will send all affiliated columns into the sky. How high? It depends on the gravity of the phase, whether the match was horizontal or vertical, and how many combos you have rolling.

Blocks will fall in one by one from the top, and sometimes you’ll get some power-ups in the mix. Send them off the top of the screen to activate them. There are also some garbage blocks, but they can be turned into normal pieces, often triggering a match when they change. Horizontal matches don’t get as much lift as vertical ones, and in theory this is your opportunity to make a combo by making further matches on the elevated pieces. This is a staple of Meteos, and it’s one of the ways where Gravitas! doesn’t quite hit the mark. It’s a real pain to make a match on those flying columns, and it ties into perhaps the biggest problem with the game on the whole: the fiddly controls on phones.

I’m not sure what the game can do about it, really. But I’m not here to fix issues, I just point them out. Anyway, the combination of the small blocks, relatively small display, and my chunky fingers means that it’s a little tricky to get the piece I want to go where I want it on iPhone. It often takes a few tries, and that can be fatal in the more difficult stages. It’s also what makes it hard for me to nail those floating combos. If I can’t move pieces accurately on a stable column, I have little hope of doing so on a moving one. Again, I don’t know how the developer could make this better, but I hope they can because I really like the game otherwise. Playing on the iPad is much more comfortable, and the game plays really well with the Pencil if you have it.

Like in Meteos, each Phase has a style of its own. The pieces look different, the background looks different, the music is different, and the gravity also changes. What impresses me here is that the overall look and feel is very “Q Entertainment”-core, if that makes sense. Sometimes more Lumines than Meteos, but always on point. It’s not quite as polished as something we would see from Mizuguchi and company, which is the main giveaway. But it looks and sounds really good, and some of the themed pieces are very amusing if a little hard to distinguish.

The main game consists of 20 Phases, and the difficulty curve is nice and smooth. Sweet at the beginning, very spicy by the end. You can also do a Quick Play, which lets you choose your favorite theme, how many blocks you need to clear and the amount of time you have to do it, and the difficulty level. A Marathon mode challenges you to keep playing as long as you can, with the difficulty rising as you go. Vs Match lets you play against another human player via local wireless or online (Hamster, take notes). That mode is very fun because the blocks you send off your screen end up cluttering theirs. Finally, your prize for beating all of the Phases of the main game is the Grav-Lab mode, which gives you the ability to play with whatever level of gravity you like. Neat.

Apart from the control issues and some minor roughness in the UI, I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Gravitas!. I did have a crash here and there, which was disappointing, but the games are so quick that it isn’t really a huge loss on the rare occasions it happens. I’d love more Phases to play, but that’s just me wanting more of something I enjoyed a fair bit. If you’re playing on iPhone, it’s really going to come down to whether or not the developer can make those controls work better. As it is, I have to recommend it with the heavy caveat that you might have to deal with the frustration of frequent missed matches, and not being able to do much reliable comboing with the floating pieces due to the lack of accuracy is a bummer. Again, if you’re on iPad you’ll probably be fine.

Gravitas! is heavily inspired by Meteos, there’s no getting around that. But considering how much of Meteos was wrapped up in a very distinct style, it’s amazing just how close this game gets to evoking the same feelings as that classic. Given the low price of entry, anyone who misses Meteos would do well to pick this up on whatever device they own despite the control difficulties. General puzzle fans might want to give it a go too. It’s a couple of solid fixes away from a strong recommendation across the board, but I’m willing to invest in that hope.

One of the reasons why the NEOGEO hardware was able to last as long as it did is because SNK was really good at playing to its strengths. Thanks to the obsession with polygons in the mid-to-late 1990s, there wasn’t a whole lot of work being done in the 2D realm for a while, which meant that the beefy NEOGEO’s sprites and backgrounds still looked as good as most of what you would see on any newer hardware. Games like Metal Slug 3 and King of Fighters ’98 show the benefits of working smart within the limits of the hardware. What does it look like if you do the opposite? It might look a lot like Ragnagard ($3.99).

This is a one-on-one fighter developed for SNK by System Vision and Saurus that features mythological characters and gods as the fighters. The likes of Susano, Son Goku, and Lucifer are included, making for a lively roster of eight playable characters and three bosses. So far, not a bad concept for a NEOGEO game. Fighting games were the system’s specialty, and using deities as fighters is an interesting hook. Sure, eight characters is a bit of a thin roster for this point in time, but not unheard of. The game even has a functioning aerial combo system, which would have been well ahead of its time when Ragnagard released in late 1996. So what’s wrong with it?

I have to take an important detour first. We need to talk about the 800-lb gorilla in the room around this point in time. Yes, that one. Donkey Kong. In late 1994, Rare pulled off the mother of all magic tricks and Nintendo reaped the rewards. With the next generation on the horizon and Nintendo’s next console still a couple of years off, it was vital to prove that the Super NES was still a viable choice in the face of things like the 3DO, SEGA Saturn, and Sony PlayStation. A fascination with polygons was already brewing in the mainstream, and while the Super NES couldn’t put together a whole lot in real-time, Rare realized it could make 3D models and render them as sprites. With some careful color choices (the Super NES typically could only display 256 colors from a palette of 32,768), Donkey Kong Country looked for all the world like a 3D game despite being no more of one than Super Mario World had been. It was a smash hit, and a lot of folks who were a lot less careful with their color choices decided to ape it.

So yes, Ragnagard is a pre-rendered CG game. The characters are pre-rendered, the backgrounds are pre-rendered, and this is 1996 so these aren’t the most detailed of models by any means. All of this art has been adapted pretty poorly to the hardware despite the hardware offering a palette significantly deeper than that of the Super NES, and it just looks bad. This might well be the worst-looking one-on-one fighter on the console. I will grant that it looks unique, and there is a certain nostalgia to this precise era that might tickle you the right way. But there’s a cost to all of this, or at least I think there is. Did the pre-rendered graphics lead to the rest of the problems or is it just happenstance?

Ragnagard just feels bad to play. The way things animate, the way moves play out, the lag on your actions, it’s all just very unpleasant. Basic moves in particular feel almost useless, with really dicey collision that I am choosing to blame on the character models and how they are boxed out. You pretty much have to play for the specials, charging up your elements to power up your character and eventually unleash some death moves. The ground game in particular is awkward, with the best feel happening when you’re taking advantage of the air dash to pull off some mid-air nonsense. Throw in a relatively unbalanced roster and you’re left with a game that even in its best context is best left as a curiosity.

But this isn’t its best context by any means. Like all of the fighters in the mobile ACA NEOGEO line-up, Ragnagard is hindered by two issues. Anyone using touch controls is going to have a hard time with some of the motions required for special moves or even just keeping on top of four virtual buttons in the heat of combat. You can use an external controller, of course. I found the game more than comfortable enough using my Backbone. But realistically, most players are going to be using the touch controls, and they’re not ideal here. The other problem is of course the inability to play multiplayer without having extra controllers and some kind of shared display. I will bang this drum every time, especially with multiplayer-focused titles like this. We need some kind of local wireless or online multiplayer option in this line.

You get the usual ACA NEOGEO features like the extra modes and a wide array of options. All are welcome here, even if they are just lipstick on a serious pig of a game. Throw that difficulty down to the lowest setting and smack around the CPU for as long as it will let you, or see if you can chip out a higher score than the other four people on the online leaderboards. Lament that you could have bought a few delicious Snickers bars instead of this.

With how affordable the ACA NEOGEO line of games is on mobile, it’s a decent way to try out the weirder, not-so-good titles in the console’s library. If you want to throw a few bucks at Ragnagard just to see how a good idea can go very wrong, I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world. At least you’re not spending a couple of hundred dollars on a cartridge. But I think you could make a good case for this being the worst one-on-one fighter SNK is likely to release in this line, and given how poorly even the best of fighters have fared under its restrictions, that leaves Ragnagard in a very bad position indeed.

Before I go into my review of The Queen’s Gambit Chess (Free) from Netflix and Ripstone, I want to be upfront about where I am coming from. First, I haven’t seen even a single episode of the show. I know, I know. I’ve heard it’s really good, but I don’t have a lot of free time for watching TV shows. So any and all overtures this game makes towards pleasing fans of the show, presumably the main target here, are largely lost on me. Second, I’m a fairly experienced chess player. I was in the chess club back in my school days, and despite me being the literal worst player in that club, I do know my way around the board well enough to put up a good fight. So those are my credentials, and I’ll be proceeding from there.

I’m going to start with what I liked about the game. Yes, it’s one of those reviews. First of all, the presentation is really nice. I don’t know the show, but I can see a lot of care went into recreating locations and making stylized versions of various characters. Most of the chess sets look great, though the designs of some of them make it hard to tell pieces apart at a glance. I respect the attempt to gamify chess, likely as a means to keep people playing through the learning curve of the game itself. Lots of coins to earn for doing various things, and you can spend them on all sorts of things. I think for someone who genuinely knows next to nothing about chess, this is an agreeable way to learn at least the basics. There’s plenty to do here as well, following Beth’s Journey through chess puzzles and matches against various characters. You can even hop online and play against other humans.

Okay, on to the rest. If I had to sum things up, I find myself unsure of who this is exactly for. I think it has to be fans of the show, but as I haven’t seen the show I can’t say whether the fanservice hits the mark or not. But in terms of chess players, I think it’s in an awkward space. It includes a ton of accessibility features that make it easier to win a game, for example, but if you were to move over to another chess game without those assists, you’d be lost. The game isn’t teaching you, it’s telling you. Sometimes it’s telling you the wrong things, even. The chess puzzles, normally a good source of learning a variety of strategies, are surprisingly limited in their scope. If you’ve played chess puzzles before, you’re not going to be terribly challenged by any of these. You’re also not going to pick up many useful techniques through them. Sometimes it does drop some useful techniques in the main game, but since it never properly revisits them or explains the theory behind them, it feels a bit pointless.

On the other side of the coin, the AI and overall progression is probably going to irritate experts, even if they jump to the highest difficulty right away. The game also really wants to help you, and there’s nothing worse than a pushy helper when you already know what you want and need to do. Okay, so maybe you just head online and play against other humans, count on the human element to sort things out? Not a bad idea, but there’s a big problem right now with the game that is magnified when you play online.

This game has a crashing problem. I tried it on multiple devices just to make sure it wasn’t just my phone, but no. Every so often, not every time but often enough to lose your trust, the game will crash in the middle of a match. If you’re playing against the CPU, it isn’t the end of the world. You can pick up where you left off. But if you’re playing against someone online, you’re pretty much done. The game never crashed during chess puzzles; only during matches and only once you get a ways into them. But that is a pretty serious problem for a chess game, I feel. I’m going to assume this will be fixed and not completely spike the game’s score for it, but I’m not going to ignore it either.

I’m not going to drag this one out too far. If you have Netflix it doesn’t cost you anything to try the game, and if you’re a fan of the show and somehow aren’t that familiar with chess, I encourage you to give it a shot. Queen’s Gambit Chess will assuredly teach you how to play the game, so if that is what you’re looking for you’re all set. But it will only take you so far, choosing to show you what to do instead of teaching you what to do. Experienced chess players will probably find it a bit unsatisfying overall thanks to the low level of difficulty and excessive handholding. Throw in some fairly serious technical issues in the current version that deeply affects multiplayer and you’ve got a game that struggles to find its own winning move.

Roto Force (Free) from developer Anton Klinger aka Accidentally Awesome Games and PID Games is a game I’ve had installed since it launched, but I didn’t actually play it until about a week later. I was impressed with it right from the get go, but I ended up forgetting about it until a friend of mine mentioned EDGE magazine saying it was the kind of game Vlambeer would still be making if the developer was still around. That stuck with me, and it became very evident after about 15 minutes of playing. This rotating blend of run ‘n gun twin stick shooting action is a shockingly good and polished experience that will likely be high up on our iOS Game of the Year list in December.

Roto Force not only has slick controls, excellent haptics, and amazing gameplay, but it also has memorable writing when you have to do things for your boss. The level biomes are varied as well, and Roto Force does a good job of introducing new mechanics, testing you, and giving you unlocks at a steady pace. Roto Force has you moving left or right, but also dashing across to any side of the level you’re in barring the one you’re on. You also have the ability to shoot (of course) and avoid enemies and hazards while you work your way through different levels, mini-bosses, and proper bosses. The checkpointing system is quite lenient, but Roto Force has you on your toes at all times with its fast-paced gameplay.

After a nice interactive tutorial, you start to see the real magic in Roto Force as you make your way through the various sets of stages in each level. It feels very carefully crafted to deliver a quality arcade twin stick shooter experience. Depending on your skill level and the accessibility options, Roto Force might feel a bit short, but I have no regrets recommending it at full price right now on iOS. If you watch the gameplay video above, it might look like a game that wouldn’t work on a touchscreen, but the developers of the mobile version have nailed the controls. I love how it feels with touch controls.

While I thought Roto Force looked excellent in its screenshots that absolutely don’t do the slick gameplay justice, it has a surprisingly well done interface not only in its controls for a touchscreen, but also the actual menus. Basically Roto Force screams polish and I was surprised to find the full game unlock price only $4.99. I expected it to be more expensive even on PC given the game quality.

I haven’t played Roto Force on Steam Deck yet, but it feels so perfect on iOS that I don’t think I’ll even bother getting it on PC. I had no performance issues on my iPhone 11 or iPad Pro, and the game looks excellent on both devices. The touch controls have options to tweak the experience to your liking, but you can also use a controller. I tested Roto Force with my Razer Kishi V2 on iPhone 11 and DualSense on iPad Pro. The game detects controllers immediately and works perfectly with them.

I mentioned accessibility and not only does Roto Force let you adjust the colors, but you can also disable screen shake like I did. You can also opt for a fixed camera perspective. When I first played Roto Force, I was afraid of getting motion sickness, but that wasn’t a problem after disabling the screen shake. The option to lock the camera is welcome as well. There’ also an accessibility assist menu under your profile that lets you adjust the game speed, damage multiplier, and toggle immortality if you’re having trouble with a stage or boss.

My only complaint with Roto Force on iOS right now is the lack of iCloud save syncing. I tested this on multiple devices across two iCloud accounts and had no success with syncing. I really wish more developers implemented this more reliably or at all.

Roto Force not only feels amazing on iOS regardless of if you use a controller or touch, but it also managed to surprise me with its writing and boss designs. I’m very impressed with the accessibility options and the haptic feedback included on iOS as well. This is one of the most-polished games I’ve played on iOS all year, and one I see myself jumping into regularly with its awesome gameplay and aesthetic. I urge you to try the game for free and see how you feel because this might be your next favorite pick up and play twin-stick shooter on mobile.