Recent reviews by MAG

One of my favorite 2D JRPGs ever, and honestly the PC version is the best way to play it. Not only are you getting one of the greatest RPGs ever made, but it also covers all the previous releases' bases. You have the anime cutscenes from the Playstation re-release. You also have the extra dungeons and other additions from the Nintendo DS version. The Android/iOS/Apple TV versions of the game don't quite sing like the PC re-release does. Pair this game with a CRT Reshade shader for a hella satisfying trip to 30 years ago.

If you play through all of the sidequests, get all the endings, all the techs, all the secret or special items, you're looking at minimum 50 hours of play, and you can probably bump that to 100 hours if you savor the experience instead of speeding through it. I don't wholeheartedly recommend games often but such a gem like Chrono Trigger certainly deserves it.

Amazing, almost voodoo-esque upscaling and frame generation. I can scarcely believe that Lossless Scaling exists let alone works as well as it does.

I find it invaluable on my ROG Ally where performance is not only limited by the hardware, but most users like me also want to maximize battery life without crushing performance or quality.

Lossless Scaling helps with both of these things. Shoehorning FSR upscaling, or using Lossless Scaling's own LS1 upscaling method. Both can help get you to a largely desired 60fps while giving you better quality than simply dropping down to 1600x900 or 1280x720.

I also use this on my ancient 3400GE mini PC to get acceptable performance out of an ancient APU.

It's cheap and it's great. Roll the dice for $6, you'll be stunned at the performance you can gain with Lossless Scaling.

In the future, I'd love a gamepad-friendly overlay for handheld PC users as it's just plain clunky to navigate with embedded gamepad controls.

I hear everyone wax nostalgic about 1980s and 1990s beat-em-ups. Homies are right, the beat-em-up genre was excellent during those eras. But the true golden era of beat-em-ups has going strong for the last 15 years or so.

Castle Crashers kicked off that golden era. It's still getting DLC in fact.

So many amazing beat-em-up games that have released since then are due to how good Castle Crashers was. I played the original release for many moons before grabbing it on Steam and having another great run through the single-player campaign.

The gameplay as far as beat-em-up games are concerned, is mostly standard fare. You have light and heavy melee attacks, jump attacks, magic attacks, projectiles and item usage. The art style and humor, although a bit crude, steal the show. Said art style makes for big, bold boss fights that are varied and entertaining. If you enjoy the genre, Castle Crashers keeps you motivated and interested from beginning to end.

The multiplayer is also fun, both local and online, plus the netcode runs great. There are also many other modes to choose from aside from the main campaign as a nice bonus.

Highly reccomended.

Poorly optimized port of a great game. I've been a huge fan of R&C since the original game in 2002. I've since moved to PC-only so I was pretty happy to see Ratchet Rift Apart coming to PC after it being exclusive to PS5 for a few years. I highly recommend the game itself, it's a great game and one of the best Ratchet games that Insomniac has ever done. The story is great, weapons are great, having multiple characters in both gameplay and story is a great new touch, and it's worth coming back to multiple times

...but be advised this isn't going to run in line with 2023 releases.

This port sucks. The performance and optimization are absolutely terrible and I can't believe that Nixxis hasn't fixed this after a year and a half on PC. So what do I mean by poor optimization? I have a solid but by no means high or low end PC. I have an AMD 5600X, RTX 3080 10GB and 32GB of fast DDR4. While I can approach 4k60 on high settings or higher, my GPU seems to max out at something like 175w, when it's capable of twice that power usage and performance. I can't seem to hit any higher regardless of settings changes. Not DLSS, not dropping to 1440p, not deleting the DirectStorage dlls, nothing. My temps stay in line with 175w usage too, so I don't believe this is a false rating from RTSS/HWinfo.

It's frustrating because the performance is left on the table right in front of the player. This is an incredible game if your hardware plays nice with the jumbled mess of poor optimization. Nixxis should be ashamed, and Sony needs a better shop to do these ports.

If you're not a performance snob or have a better machine than I do, chances are you won't have the performance complaints that I do. There is so much to love but also so much to be frustrated over.

Recommended if you can catch it on sale. I enjoyed Pocky & Rocky as a kid on SNES, so I was curious to pick this up and re-experience the game with a modern twist. It has all the top-down shmup gameplay of the SNES and 80s arcade version, but with some added QOL improvements, extra characters and some small unlockables.

My main gripe with it is that there just isn't a lot to substantiate full-price for this game. It's pretty much a basic story mode, an arcade mode, and some extra characters to unlock. Near as I can remember, it's more or less different stages after you get past the first stage as compared to the SNES version. That said, would have been great to get the SNES stages after you complete the main game. Sadly that's not included, neither is anything from the original Kiki Kaikai, Pocky & Rocky 2 on SNES or Pocky & Rocky with Becky from GBA. This game could have been a great opportunity to include the legacy titles. Maybe DLC down the road but I doubt this is the sort of title that sells enough to motivate the dev to do DLC etc.

Aside from playing the story mode, there's not a lot to do once that's complete aside from a few things you can unlock, so once you're finished there isn't much to come back to. If you really like the main game, it's very much replayable but there's nothing else to do once you're done with the handful of main tasks that the game offers.

As a fan of the SNES version when I was a kid, I was pleased with this remake-sequel hybrid. Definitely recommended to old-school shmup fans or retro gaming enthusiasts in general. It touched on all of the right points for me. It's a great mix of nostalgia plus something new. If you can snag it on sale, it'll fill a few afternoons with great throwback visuals and gameplay but not much else.

For a die-hard fan of both Dragon Ball and JRPGs both old and new, this wound up being more or less the perfect storm for me. I've had the game since launch and spent over 100 hours on both the main quest and DLCs. I played through the main quest at launch and have been coming back to it for the DLC episodes and piecemealing of side quests off and on for five years.

This is pretty much the best way to experience the Z portion of the Dragon Ball story aside from watching or reading it. While it's not 1:1 with the source material, it hits all of the hot points through the story while giving the player fun quest tasks, battles, and side quests for about 25-30 hours. If you want to go back and complete the game in its entirety, you're looking at much more than this, and if you're someone like me who enjoys the Dragon Ball world, you can spend a ton of time exploring and re-exploring the game world and even going back to battle against bosses and other story points that you've already completed. It's a pretty immense game and a must-have for Dragon Ball fans. The battle and party mechanics are extremely satisfying. Your characters gain all of the fun power-ups and techniques from the manga and anime so you can look forward to gorgeous punches, kicks, team-up techs, hitsparks, and screen-filling special moves while you take on all of the enemies and supervillains you see in the series.

If you're wondering if playing this game is a good substitute for watching the series, I'd say it's not; but if you don't have time to watch Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z (don't skip the original!), this game is a great Cliff Notes version. If you're not a fan of Dragon Ball, this game probably won't change that but if you're a fan of Dragon Ball or modern JRPGs, you'll love it.

A crummy port of a great game. Get Borderless Gaming and run Bloodstained COTN through it, otherwise you're not going to get a proper aspect ratio in fullscreen.

With that out of the way, this game is fantastic if you're into the old NES Castlevania III. COTN plays like a love letter to this game much like Ritual Of The Night plays like the PS2 Castlevania Symphony Of The Night. The naming similarities are no coincidence. The platforming is tight just like the NES originals, and the multitude of paths, characters and endings are satisfying to achieve. Absolutely recommended.

If you're a fan of the Shoot-Em-Up (Shmup) category, this game will definitely be a worthwhile purchase for you.

I'm immediately reminded of the SNES classic shoot-em-up Phalanx when I first booted up Devil Engine. Others cite Thunder Force, which seems accurate. I don't have much experience with the Thunder Force series sadly.

The graphics land somewhere between 16 and 32 bit classic titles from years past, and I really enjoy that style of presentation for old-school shoot-em-up games like this. That also means that even an older laptop can handle this title, so you'll be able to take it with you wherever you go. My only complaint here is that the color palette is a bit restricted, SNES shooters were a bit more varied in color presentation. That's nitpicking though, Devil Engine looks wonderful.

Sound effects are punchy and crisp, about what you'd expect if you're already familiar with the titles in this genre from the late 80's and early 90's. The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal, with nods to anime of the era.

The gameplay as stated, borrows a bit from classic shooters like Gradius, Phalanx, Thunder Force, and others. A new mechanic here is the ability to use a "burst" move to absorb enemy fire. The timing of the burst move limits spamming it to survive, and you'll find plenty of challenge here. Devil Engine is hard. Very hard. Even on its easiest setting. Luckily, you earn unlockable items as your lifetime score increases. Additional continues are your primarily earned item, but there's also fun shaders and other cosmetic customization options here. As you play and rack up lifetime score, you'll be able to progress further and further into Devil Engine as your skills will no doubt also improve.

There's a few neat extras, Challenge Mode with specific goals within mini-stages, and apparently a Boss Rush mode. Great stuff.

If you're into shoot-em-up games from the 80s and 90s, you might just find one of the best ones you've ever played in Devile Engine.

Doom hits most of the marks I could had asked for in a Doom reboot. It plays fast, the environments are creepy, the game is a good challenges, and the combat is fun and engaging. I'm a little sore about the lack of single-player mods, but the main campaign is great. The game runs maxed out in 1080p with my GTX1060 and looks wonderful, so I'm happy abou that as well. If your system has the chops (try the demo to see how it runs), Doom 2016 is a no-brainer.