Recent reviews by Anna Stonefield

For a game that seems to revolve about the idea of speed and racing, the game does an amazing job at denying you any and all sense of speed. Characters aren't very quick, and lose all speed immediately upon touching any wall surface, as they were made out of glue. The sticky nature of wall interaction probably hinders platforming more than it helps with walljumps. Rush Bros seems confused at what it wants to do, putting walljump training wheels in a title that seems to want people to compete at platforming skills.

The game also is very bad about giving you information. The "tutorial" level has none of it, leaving me confused and stuck at some point trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do but wasn't going to tell me. I received multiple "challenge" notifications from random players on the tutorial stage which certainly was adding to the confusion. Levels can be confusing and hard to navigate the first time about, with some having you run deep into death traps before realizing you need a key from some obscure branch in the level, or just letting you figure out that there are no more paths available to progress and the end of the level is actually in the beginning.

The music-driven part is honestly such a non-factor that I almost forgot about it. I suppose it could affect your timing based on track played, but is that really a good thing? I don't think so.

Memorizing levels seems to be more rewarding than competent platforming in Rush Bros, and memorizing levels for the short minute-or-so experience is just never going to be rewarding enough.

Mars, spacesuits and jetpacks. Don't let the action tag fool you though, there isn't any combat, much less any real action to speak of, just lots of gardening and pseudoscience. Indeed, Waking Mars is a xenoecological adventure to recover a missing exploration probe as you uncover the secrets hidden within the Lethe Cavern.

Start out in a chamber mostly devoid of life, introduce moisture, plant seeds in fertile terrain and watch them spring to life! But as they start to spread out in the area, you might find that it may not be the most efficient ecosystem, or that certain Zoa may threaten to eliminate the rest of it! It's all very simple and there are limited patches for planting, but the number of cross interactions between different species and their environments makes for a surprising level of complexity.

You may have beat a zone by hitting a certain biomass within it and unlocked new areas, but later you might want to revist them to increase the efficiency of the ecosystems in them, improving synergies and generating even more biomass. Or you just want to visit it to pick up some seeds for use in a new area. The game encourages you to build ecosystems that benefit heavily from synergistic interactions but isn't afraid to let you build insane unstable ones that have large amounts of biomass constantly in flux as life is rapidly reproduced as it is destroyed. Sometimes planting a single Zoa (ART, an AI program in your suit will tell you that they aren't plants!) too soon can make it hard to fix as it spreads all around before you can start planting your desired Zoa in other patches. Sometimes the easiest way to stop this happening is to kill it. You may however only carry a certain amount of each seed and that makes you have to think about how you have to go about planting them (though it also means that it can be tedious if you are trying to populate an area with mainly one sort of Zoa). There is even the potential to wipe out an entire species, though many plants do reappear in later chambers if you accidentally do so in an early one.

While many of the game's quirks make it arguably a better one, it is not without faults. You are almost required to revist some old chambers to do a quick restock of seeds every few chambers and while you can teleport between chambers you have visited I feel it could have been more streamlined. Speaking of tedium, Ledon Zoa are amazing at providing biomass AND populating entire zones, but can be a nightmare to plant as they float upwards aimlessly, cannot be picked up and crumble with little force. ART is like a less charming Wheatley and can be quite jarring. Fortunately your player character, Liang, is the most likeable character in the game. The signal decoding segments can be a tad confusing and so can most of the endings.

Overall an excellent title, more enjoyable than gardening.

I've heard "Angry Birds" thrown around when describing Gravity Badgers, but it really isn't. The similarities end at the slightshot pullback that you do to start every level (and gravity fields, in the case of Angry Birds Space).

Gravity Badgers mostly involves you flinging your badger to the exit, picking up to 3 energy cores along the way which decides how many stars you get for the level, after deducting one for each failed attempt. This makes it that there is often very little you can do fix a failed first shot and it usually boils down to making a shot and hoping that it grabs all 3 pickups and successfully makes its way to the exit. In essence, lives are irrelevant and most levels are fling and pray. There is little actual gameplay to speak of, if any.

Levels are mind-numbingly dull. Between every frustrating "GAH ALMOST THAT LAST GRAVITY FIELD UGH" level lies maybe 5 that involve flinging your badger in a straight line. There are multiple characters to unlock, but as far as I can tell there is no difference besides the slight visual changes on the character.

There is some nice art in the game that they use to move the story as you progress through the zones, but the in-game visuals are just hilariously underwhelming. Between the S-shaped space worms that lack all actual animation and squash and stretch on the spot and the way the protagonist flips like a piece of paper after speaking with his granddad, you'd just wish they'd put maybe a bit more effort into the visuals.

I might not enjoy Angry Birds, but I can strongly recommend that over Gravity Badgers any day. I doubt even mobile gamers can be engaged with this title.

This title had a lot of potential. It delivered very little.

"As agent Carter, call the shots, pull the trigger and lead your squad in a gripping third-person tactical shooter set within a covert war to protect humanity from an otherworldly enemy. "

In terms of setting it could have been one of the more interesting ones of recent memory, but it fails to leverage this and instead challenges your ability to suspend your disbelief for its ridiculous plot and happenings.

Gameplay-wise, there is very little to it beyond a third-person shooter with some abilities to fire off from time to time. There is nothing tactical about it, your squadmates have more difficulty killing foes with a rifle than you do with a pistol outside of their active abilities. Enemy waves spawning in close to you on the battlefield means making tactical manuevers like flanking extremely risky with very little potential payoff.

The squad mechanic becomes more of a burden and you are constantly required to babysit your squadmates by telling them to move out of enemy LoS and heal them up when they get seriously hurt. You will have more success putting all your squadmates far and out of danger, and combining their abilities to set up easy kills - you know that the commander in full cover will reveal himself just because your Commando is taunting him from a mile away, only to be sniped off by your Recon EVERY SINGLE TIME. All this while they have trouble taking out a single Sectoid or Drone. You do want your agents alive if only just to keep ability unlocks for more means to clear out threats more quickly and efficiently.

Activating abilities off cooldown between third-person shooting? You're better off with Mass Effect. This game does have long elevator rides (and decontamination chambers), if you are into that sort of thing.

This is possibly the first ever TD I got really annoyed with playing.

At it's core it's an interesting concept - build a tower where each room does a different thing (i.e. shooting, generating income, healing, freezing) and they serve to defend your hotel core (lose it and you fail). Strange critters come along and try to take out your core and the rooms surrounding it. Oh, and the music changes as you build more rooms. Sound great? It should have been, really.

Gameplay wise it is easy to understand - build rooms to protect core, then build more rooms to protect those rooms, get some cool defensive structure going. The more rooms you build AND protect, the more successful you generally are, right? Not quite so as you have absolutely no way of knowing where enemies spawn from, and are sometimes randomly spawned "enraged", allowing them to plow through your defenses twice as fast. Add that onto the fact that you cannot control how your buildings interact and choose targets AND the fact that having a larger building affects how certain enemies act make it so larger structures are often more inefficient at killing enemies. This makes the building mechanic largely unintuitive and very frustrating as you can fail soley for having invested more in firepower and defenses.

Perhaps more annoying than the unintuitive room building mechanic is the fact that the game is marketed as a music toy or game. It is easily the worst sounding music game I have ever played. Enemy related noises are often jarring. This is made worse by the fact there are no volume controls available in-game. In fact, you may find more enjoyment in one of the many freely available simplified step sequencer toys than this.