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In Umiro, you need to draw paths for your characters - who walk at a fixed speed - to avoid moving black orbs. This will frequently involve having them run around in circles to stall as an orb passes by.

Although you can see the corresponding position of the other character as you draw, the death orbs continue moving throughout the entire planning phase - the only way to reset their position, in order to get a known "time equals zero" for consistent results, is to die. This creates an incredibly frustrating pattern of "throwing away" a first attempt because you know the orb position won't be quite right. (And before you say "well, you could wait until the orbs cycle back," there are different groups of orbs that move at different rates quite often.)

Okay, so if the gameplay didn't grab me, how's the story? Mediocre at best. The characters and overall story are paper-thin, I saw any reveals coming a mile off, and overall I wasn't fond of it. That only leaves the visuals, which I'll admit have a nice aesthetic, but not enough to carry the game.

YMMV, but I didn't enjoy my time with this game and I don't think it's worth the asking price.

Not recommended.

Umurangi Generation is dripping with aesthetic, style, and heart. It celebrates street culture and doesn't shy away from making a statement.

You play as a photo journalist(?) who documents different angles of a very turbulent time. You're scored based on your photographs, but honestly, you can ignore the scoring aspect.

The base game feels significantly kneecapped by the slow moving speed - the Macro DLC fixes this by giving you roller blades, a can of spray paint, and more in-depth settings to tweak your photos. The DLC improves the game so much I can honestly say I wouldn't recommend the game without it.

I 100%'d this game in less than five hours with fairly heavy use of guides, for the sake of expediency and my own patience.

YMMV but I recommend it.

Galactic Mining Corp feels like something between one of those addictive web-browser games you'd find back in the day, and a modern mobile game without exploitative microtransactions. But in terms of its rhythm, it's also strangely reminiscent of idle/clicker games.

The meat of the gameplay is vertically-oriented mining expeditions to gather resources for progression, but there's a layer just behind it of smartly allocating those resources for the best ROI. It's very engaging, but occasionally irritating - more than once, I found myself feeling obligated to go back and check my collection to manually level-up any tiles that needed it, because otherwise EXP would be wasted and my overall progress would become less efficient (when what I really wanted to do was just keep mining).

The progression of new acquisitions also feels very idle-clicker-esque, with late-game crewmates being an order of magnitude better than your starting crewmates, and late-game tiles being orders of magnitude stronger than starting tiles, not for any in-lore reason but because that's just how these games are. Likewise, the late-game grind of finishing off those last 30 or so resource tiles took about 10 hours, to the point where I opted to double-task listening to podcasts or Youtube rather than listening to the in-game audio.

Are any of those dealbreakers? Nah. The dropoff in the dopamine rush from blazing-fast progression is a shame, but getting that 100% was still satisfying and I enjoyed my time with this game overall.

Recommended.

SiNKR 2 is the rare puzzle game that manages to be difficult while still having multiple paths to correct solutions. I completed it in about three hours and enjoyed my time with it.

Recommended.

AFTERBURN takes place over an infinite plain of procedurally-generated, mildly-mountainous landscape. If you fly too far from any particular opponent, the game will "rubber-band" them back in front of you, in a similar way to some racing games. This keeps you consistently engaged, but it also incentivizes you to continually flee from the increasingly absurd number of enemies that blip into existence out of thin air, and only pick off a couple at a time as they appear in front of you.

Once you settle in to this style of play - and you'll have to, eventually, if you plan to beat the campaign - your main focus will be on improving survivability, as your enemies have properly BS auto-aim that only seems confounded by Star Fox-style barrel rolls. So the aircraft will start to feel pretty samey, since you'll ultimately just be mashing the barrel-roll button and hoping your regenerative health doesn't hit zero before it refills.

All of that is not to trash the game - only to describe its mechanical limitations. If you don't mind how crude the difficulty is, you'll actually have a ton of fun with this title. It's a great game to play with an inexpensive flight stick (though I reverted to M+KB at the endgame difficulty), the low-poly visuals with bloom effects are charming, and you'll have some really thrilling moments with close calls with collision. Just don't expect the higher fidelity of more expensive air combat games.

I completed AFTERBURN in almost exactly two hours, and even though the brick wall of difficulty in the 6th level took a lot of sweat to overcome, I enjoyed my time with it.

Recommended.

Assemble with Care takes the gameplay of "mechanic simulator" type games and applies it to a short story about familial relationships.

A game like this absolutely needs to get two things right: Ease of mechanics, and strength of characters. Does it? Pretty much. Object interactions are a bit fiddly at times, and I personally opted to turn off the VO for most of the story (I listen to most spoken audio material at 1.5x-1.75x, so maybe I was just impatient). But it all went fine.

I burned through the game in less than an hour an a half, but, again - I'm impatient. You need to be in the right kind of mood for this one. Light a scented candle, have your favorite YA novel on your desk, try to identify with the character's emotional state of mind. The story's not fine literature but it knows what notes it wants to hit.

Recommended at whatever price point you feel is worth 1.5-2.5 hours of indie gameplay straight out of the Schoolastic Book Fair.

A person would need to be incredibly petty and critical to find fault with a game that is clearly made with love, where all proceeds go to charity.

Luckily, I am one such person.

First, the headline: This game scrolls from left-to-right at a pretty constant rate. If you play this game for more than ten minutes at a stretch, you'll notice that your field of view seems to continue warping leftward for a few minutes after you finish playing. For me personally, I noticed the muscles around my temples seemed to tense at this effect. If that sort of stuff tends not to effect you, great - otherwise, buyer beware.

Second, the difficulty. There are some pretty tight tolerances in this game, and the width of vehicles isn't especially well-telegraphed. I often found myself clipping vehicles I was trying to thread, and the upper border of the map in the sand area can be deceiving with whether a vehicle blocks its northernmost border.

Third, some of these dang goals. If you're a completionist like myself, be prepared for a bit of frustration in the latter half of your time with this game. I reduced the game speed from 60 FPS to 40 FPS, and that helped me clinch a few elusive goals that had evaded me previously.

Are those flaws enough for me to thumbs-down the game?

Not... quite. It's still a cute homage to Minit, and many of this game's quirks carry over from it. Minit, too, had a bit of jank involved and a difficulty that was near the upper limit of reasonable. If you liked Minit, you'll probably like Minit Fun Racer. Plan on this game being about 3 hours to 100% and spend (er, donate) what you feel is worth that time.

Recommended.

What I love about Righty Tighty XL is how much of an impact your own skill has with how quickly you accrue points. Starting out, you'll be earning points the "normal" way: grabbing the white circle and bringing it to the scoring area. But as you get more comfortable, you can quickly earn points in the early game through "near misses" with obstacles, which (imo) are easier to earn in this game than its two siblings.

Definitely recommend anyone pick this one up, it's a great $1 game.

I gave the original Bit Blaster XL a thumbs-down, citing its irritating control scheme and overly-aggressive difficulty. This is four times the cost for - basically - the same game. Do I recommend it?

Yes. Yes, absolutely.

The control scheme is changed from a binary left-right with a set turning speed - really only fit for keyboard arrows, incredibly frustrating with gamepad joystick - to a 360-degree scheme that is optimized for a gamepad joystick. This change alone, I kid you not, is easily worth the three extra dollars and your consideration.

Your ship actually feels precise now. On top of that, enemy spawn behavior, ammo depletion and replenishment rates, and weapon balance have all been reworked to feel more satisfying and more fair. More than once I asked myself, "Should I use a bomb to make sure I don't lose health?" Only to think, "Nah, y'know what, I think I got this."

I unlocked all of the ships in the original Bit Blaster XL before even getting close to the high-score achievement, and even then it felt far out of reach. In Super Bit Blaster XL, I got it with two ships left to unlock. Super Bit Blaster XL is so good that it made me reconsider the original, and after a few rounds I found my opinion had not changed: Bit Blaster XL is unpleasant to play, Super Bit Blaster XL is a joy.

Don't even bother playing the original. Grab a controller and pick this one up.

Recommended.

How do you know when the difficulty curve of a game is nearly perfect?

When you unlock the high-score achievement within ten minutes of unlocking the cumulative-number achievements.

Adamvision really knows his way around single-button games, and this is one of his better ones. I 100%'d it in about an hour, but this is really a game you should play for a few minutes at a time when you aren't able to sink your teeth into anything more substantial.

Recommended.