Recent reviews by Allegro

As someone who is learning Japanese, I was hoping to be able to get more out of it than I did.

Go Go Nippon is great in that it displays English and Japanese simultaneously. Japanese School Life on the other hand shows just Japanese or just English. While it does have Japanese audio, it's kind of useless as the background music is far too loud and there are no controls to reduce the volume - and there is no Japanese text to accompany the audio unless you eliminate the English entirely.

Not useful for anyone learning the language.

Story really would have benefited from at bare minimum, having a volume slider for the music.

Feels like a good blend of Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow. A couple of spots in the game were a little unintuitive and required some online help, but for the most part the game is pretty solid. I'd recommend if you want to try a great Metroidvania.

I haven't actually played the game despite having 12 hours on record!

For whatever reason, the developers have decided to have the updates managed through their own launcher instead of through Steam. So instead of staying automatically up-to-date, you have to attempt to launch the game on Steam before it will up date.

This means that literally every time I've attempted to play the game, I've had to do a multi GB update first, which in turn means that I do something else while waiting, and then forget to actually play the game. So the 12 hours is how much time the app sat either idling or updating on my pc.

Would love to play the game, but this process needs to be automated via Steam.

Staxel is a great game! It combines Minecraft like building mechanics with Harvest Moon type farming mechanics. I received it as part of a humble bundle and knew nothing of it at the time, but gave it a shot and have put a bunch of hours into it with my preschooler. He loves getting gifts from our pet, and picking flowers. I highly recommend it for some family friendly gaming.

I should mention, that while Steam says I've only played ~ 3 hours, this is 100% not true. I played tons of time, but in Steam Offline mode, which doesn't properly track time spent playing. We've probably played it at least 30 hours.


My only complaint is that some of the things you need to build with can only be ordered through a shipping catalog (using in-game currency) but you need to use a keyboard to use the shipping catalog. If it weren't for needing the catalog the game would be 100% playable with a controller.

So just as a disclaimer, one of the first jobs I had was for Side Effects Software Inc., the company that makes Houdini. That is to say, I'm biased. That said, I've been using Houdini professionally for 13 years in both the film and games industry and it is my software of choice when it comes to visual effects and procedural modelling. I have not worked for Side Effects since 2009, and I volunteered to beta test the Steam release.

The procedural paradigm that Houdini employs allows it's users incredible flexibility when it comes to their workflow. While the developers work hard to make off-the-shelf tools that make things such as fluid dynamics and character rigging a breeze, I think the real strength of Houdini is not in the pre-made tools, but in the massive library of low-level tools that exist. If there's something you want to do, you can bet there will be multiple ways to go about achieving it. While you can certainly use the existing fluid simulation tools in Houdini, you could (if you have the knowledge) also incorporate your very own fluid dynamics solver. This, to me, makes Houdini the most user friendly software I've used. The more I use it, the more I feel like there's no limit to what I can do with it. A lot of the time that I'm using it, I almost feel like I'm a kid again, playing with Lego.

The developers are some of the most responsive I've seen. New builds of Houdini are released daily (you can opt in to let Steam automatically download daily builds, which it is not configured to do by default) which fix bugs reported on their website. It is very rare to see that level of service, and is very valuable to have in production.

I can't recommend this package enough. If you're on the fence about it, go try the free Apprentice version on their website.

This is a game that had completely flown under my radar. I've never heard a single thing about it. The only reason that changed is because I picked it up as part of the Humble Freedom Bundle. Factoring in all the games I already owned from that bundle, it works out to having paid something like $0.67 for this game. And at that price? Hands down, 100% worth it.

When deciding which game to try out, I went to howlongtobeat.com. I saw that this game takes roughly an hour to complete and so despite knowing literally nothing else about it, I decided to give it a go.

It's a fantastic experience. I love the low-poly art style, the overall color scheme and atmosphere. The music is absolutely stellar. It's a tight little package. Short, but sweet. It reminded me of the Star Trek TNG episode Inner Light.

Given the length of the game, I'm somewhat disappointed at the number of bugs.
1. I have a dual monitor set-up. There seems to be no way for me to specify which monitor it plays on on full-screen.
2. I tell it not to be full screen, but the option doesn't take. I save settings, close, re-open, it's full screen again. I ended up working around this by telling it not to be 1920x1080...
3. The game crashed to desktop twice during my 66 minute session.

Is it a great experience? Yes. Is it worth $8.79 Canadian. As much as I liked it, I wouldn't pay that much for it. Not for an hour long experience. I'm quite satisfied with it for the amount that I paid. But I wouldn't recommend forking out more than $5 for it.

What can I say that hasn't been said already? It's a fantastic game that has great mechanics. I've put over 100 hours into it and will likely come back to it some day.

My only qualm is that some of the unlockables happen by pure randomness and so it's theoretically possible to put thousands of hours in and never get the unlockables.

Not the longest game in my collection, but definitely one of the better ones. The puzzles are not complicated so long-time gamers can enjoy a stress free experience with fantastic visuals and music. The biggest challenge is simply coordinating your hands and eyes as you'll be controlling two characters simultaneously with each half of the controller. Or feel free to play with a partner and each of you can share the one controller.

You ought to be able to complete it in two or three short sittings. Half the time I have on record was simply because I gave myself the challenge of translating the menus from a language I'm not 100% fluent in. And on that note, I will say: whoever localized this to Japanese did a pretty amateur job. It's sketchy right from the very first screen in the launcher. 日本人? That's some half assed translation in that language menu. It doesn't get much better either.

I got the game for free from the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter. It's probably ungrateful of me to leave a negative review of something I got for free... but the fact is, I did a playthough in under an hour my first time playing. It wasn't challenging, the english translation was terrible, and I don't think it's as polished as I would expect from a paid game.

As a freebie it's worthwhile, but as a paid game? I can't recommend paying more than a couple of dollars for it.

Picked this up during the Steam Summer sale for ~$5. Finally got around to playing it and finished all missions on normal and hard difficulties in just over ~24 hours. $5 Is probably the right price point for it. It's a fantastic game, well done, but really should have been released as part of TPP as it's really just an extended Tanker or Virtuous Mission.