Staff Article Lists

What if we wanted to take on the climate change crisis by simply modifying our DNA so that we took on animal traits like fur so that we could regulate our body temps? Or work out medical issues that overtake our bodies with a fresh new species takeover? That’s the baseline of the story of “FixFox”, a solo game venture by Rendlike and published by Joystick Ventures. You’re a spacefaring clumsy foxy fixer-upper named Vix who is accompanied by her toolbox Tin, and you’re pulled into one last job to prove you’ve got the repairing chops to keep your job. Unfortunately, you crash land on a planet in a system that looks down on tools and fixing, and will police your attempts to solve the various planets’ problems, unless you distract them with a radio broadcast. Over the course of trying to escape the planet’s various communication and humanitarian problems, you discover a story of humanity’s past and its innate problems in the present. FixFox had a vibe & story that pulled me in and kept me engaged with its many twists and turns, and so many little unique details.

Just watch the trailer and tell me you don't want this game, we dare you. Barkour is "an action/stealth game where you take on the role of a tail-wagging canine 009 agent, unleashed by a secret organization to fight evil in a world that that's anything but ruff and serious." I mean COME ON! 

What do you do when you learn about a deadly disease killing a planet? You go rescue all the inhabitants of course! Creatures of Ava start you off landing/crashing on the planet of Ava. It’s up to you and basically you alone, to rescue all the creatures and convince the local intelligent population, the Naam, to leave the dying planet and come live on the space station Bioark.

I’m gonna start this review with a hot-take: I don’t think Episode II: Attack Of The Clones is a bad Star Wars movie. In fact, out of all three prequels, it’s actually my favorite of the three films. Yes, some parts do drag but they weren’t enough to soil my enjoyment of the movie. I loved how it expanded on Coruscant in the beginning (Yes, I liked the diner scene and, yes, I’m OK with something like that existing in Star Wars) and the entire Geonosis battle sequence is a visual spectacle of sheer beauty. However, I never played any of the games based on Episode II growing up as they were on systems I didn’t own, like the Gamecube and Xbox as I still had a N64. Thankfully, thanks to the folks over at Aspyr, one of the games I missed out on has got a second chance at life with the remastering of 2002’s ‘Star Wars Bounty Hunter’ and, I gotta say, this game is a mixed bag.

Wow I sure have a lot of hours on survival games, I also really like creature collecting games. Wouldn’t it be awesome if I enslaved a ton of creatures and forced them to work in the mines and fight with you to capture and enslave even more creatures could find a bunch of cool pals to hang out with while playing a survival game? Seriously though, Palworld takes the best from both survival and creature capture games, plus GUNS, you almost never get guns in creature capture games. In Palworld, you can turn your pals into guns! 

Metroidvanias can be a dime a dozen in the gaming world. Similar to roguelikes, they’re a popular genre amongst indie developers. When looking at these types of games, there needs to be a creative “hook” or new spin in setting or design that grabs your attention and shows you, “Hey, this is something worth checking out!” BioGun manages to do this right at the forefront with a game completely played from inside of your best friend. You explore the many body organs as a gun-wielding vaccine injected into your dog to fight the catastrophic “dooper” virus that has duped scientists around the globe as it wreaks havoc on pets. Along the way you’ll meet up and be helped (or hunted) by a vast array of cute, cool, and corrupted characters, most of which have an anthro spin on them, if they’re not viruses or enemies plaguing your dog. All of this in pursuit of eradicating the Dooper virus once and for all.

The forests of this realm were quiet, and an unsettling chill always lingered in the air. Though we channeled the Tome of Glades to camouflage our race with fur and our uncanny ability to traverse the woods gracefully, the land was hostile with an unrelenting sense of wrongness. Our magic changed barren spaces to something livable, but death wasn’t just an intangible thing here, it claimed this world and the beasts in them.

I remember first hearing about this game when it went under the title of Project Downfall and thought it looked like a fun first-person shooter, but that’s as far as I got with the game as it was, at the time, a PC exclusive. Now, with it getting a console release under the new name of Neckbreak (or, as I called it by accident, Neckbrake), I’m happy to say that, outside of a few small issues I had, the game was worth the wait.