2025 Game Reviews - 105-84

     This page contains the reviews for numbers 105-84 of my 2025 game reviews. Most of this group are games I considered to have flaws so detrimental that they turned me off before I could find a redeeming quality or so technically flawed that I threw them at the bottom and didn't bother revisiting them. To see the rest, visit this page.

105. The Bazaar

    Designed primarily by YouTube creator Reynad, The Bazaar is an asynchronous PvP autobattler game that looks to do away with the visual framing of the fantasy unit combat found in the likes of Teamfight Tactics or Hearthstone Battlegrounds in favor of trinkets and objects casting spells on timers. I actually found the gameplay for The Bazaar to be incredibly fun, but this game has ended up on the bottom of my list because of mismanagement and player hostility by the development team Reynad has surrounded himself with and largely been the driving force behind.

    Throughout the course of three or four total economy reworks, including the inclusion of and subsequent removal of web3 technologies for player-owned game items on the blockchain and gameplay items sold for premium currency despite prior claims of no pay-to-win elements during kickstarter funding, Reynad was openly hostile and antagonistic toward the player base. He would often directly ridicule and mock player suggestions or sentiment voiced as constructive criticism, just to then turn around and implement many of those suggestions after the alternative he pushed forward with failed to meet expectations. 

    Tempo Storm, the company he started to create this game, went through a round of layoffs and there were concerning posts about the future of the game from the former community manager on Reddit. Well... on a second subreddit created by players because the official Reddit was heavily moderated and Reynad was frequently banning anyone who said anything about the game that wasn't strictly complimentary. Even posts along the lines of "I'm enjoying the game. Here are a couple constructive suggestions I'd like to propose." were removed, with Reynad stating that he believed most of the userbase on the game's Reddit was bots made by a small group or single actor.

    Eventually, the game moved to Steam where it went through multiple pricing changes and delayed reimbursement of player resources promised as compensation for the removal of the blockchain system that allowed players to own duplicate copies of cosmetic items. Unfortunately, this is a solid game ultimately held back by a petty person unable to step back from the spotlight and let the grownups run the show. I have gone from recommending this game to friends, many of whom I got to play the game and all of whom enjoyed the gameplay, to actively discouraging anyone from supporting this terrible practice. Truly a shame for a game with such solid mechanical bones.

104. My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection

        One might look at this key art and think "How could the use of generative AI surprise you, Noah?" but rest assured that the art is not where the AI usage was. This game featured generative AI for the creation of in-game music. I was only surprised to learn this when reading reviews after finishing the game, because I played the game muted and listened to a podcast the entire time anyway. The placement of this game so low is not strictly because of that use, but rather because its use was undisclosed at launch, in violation of Steam's TOS.

    The general vibe is not unlike games like "A Game About Digging A Hole" or "Powerwash Simulator" in its loop of doing a repetitive menial task to earn money to do that task marginally more optimally. I enjoy that type of "checkout and listen to a podcast for a couple hours" vibe for a game but this one performed poorly, often hitching and spiking my GPU usage to 100% on a 4080. Its gameplay was ultimately not as interesting as other similar games on this list because its upgrades don't necessarily change the method of collection, and solely change the efficiency, resulting in no deviation in game action from the beginning through the end.

103. Unbeatable

    

    I wanted to like Unbeatable. I love a good story and I really love a good rhythm game. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this game's rhythm gameplay is good or not because despite over an hour of play across two sessions, I never experienced any rhythm gameplay past the input latency-determining minigame before you start the game. At the time my first session ended, I remarked to someone I was talking about the game with "There's an opening segment that's like... some of my favorite 8 minutes in a game this year and then there's been about 35 minutes of weird disjointed story... none of which has had any rhythm gameplay at all"

    I think I might have been willing to stick it out a bit longer with Unbeatable, since I'd heard from others that once you finally get to the rhythm game part of this rhythm game it's pretty fun, but unfortunately the story it was telling on the way failed to hook me. I found the writing to be rather flat and characterization lacked any sort of depth that grounded me in the story or gave me a reason to care about the people I was being introduced to.

    I found most of the dialogue to be written in a way that I think was intended to be funny, but came off as grating to me. This was compounded by frequent side-busting out of the continuation of the narrative to explain a turn of phrase of the quirky kid who doesn't understand it because she's just a quirky kid... and they've reminded us they're just a quirky kid multiple times with gags like "They're like 10." to be met with a correction that they're 12. It got very old very fast for me.

    I did also encounter one particularly annoying part where I was trying to walk somewhere and got stuck in place. I couldn't manage to wiggle my way free and the only solution was to close the game and re-open it. This resulted in having to go through repeated dialogue before being able to continue.

    I hear the arcade mode is great for jumping straight into the rhythm game parts but I didn't even know there even was an arcade mode to be found here until I'd already uninstalled. Sadly, I'm not going to end up reinstalling for the arcade mode and will just pick up the soundtrack instead.

102. Monster Hunter Wilds

    Monster Hunter Wilds might be the worst PC port of the year. I made the unfortunate mistake of playing this game on PC. Between terrible connection issues preventing me from playing at all for most of the first couple days I managed to log in just long enough to see the terrible smearing all over the place and experience the weirdly high CPU/GPU usage for a game whose environments really didn't have much going on.

    Admittedly, I've never been into Monster Hunter as a franchise. Wilds was actually my first attempt to play a Monster Hunter game. This was one of the bigger swings for me in stepping outside my comfort zone with games and it was also one of the worst technical experiences I had for the year. I don't see myself trying again later since the franchise has never done anything to appeal to me in the 20 years or so I've known it's around.

101. Sid Meier's Civilization VII

    Similar to Monster Hunter, this was a game that's typically outside my wheelhouse but that I was willing to dive into. Civ is certainly closer in genre to games I play all the time and I was willing to go in with a commitment to learning the deep intertwined systems here and make an honest attempt at it. Unfortunately, also similar to Monster Hunter, Civ VII's launch was marred by technical issues. I went from crashing shortly after startup to the game just not launching. This was not uncommon at the time and I encountered many threads from others experiencing the same problems.

    I almost jumped back in to give this another shot with the announcement that its Switch 2 version would have Joycon Mouse support, as I was looking for a game that would make use of that feature, but ultimately I decided that the juice was likely not worth the squeeze for me personally.

    My feelings on Civ VII are similar to Monster Hunter Wilds and placing them this low is surely in large part fueled by my previous disinterest anyway, but I think there's something to be said for the problems I had that prevented me from playing when I finally was willing to take the dive.

100. Bratz: Rhythm & Style

    I know... I know... what was I expecting? I certainly wasn't coming in with much in the way of expectations for Bratz. However, even with the caveat that I should be expecting a bad time, I managed to feel let down by this one.

    I streamed this game in Discord with a group of 8 or so friends and we went into it with all the enthusiasm a group of middle-aged dudes going "Hell yeah it's Bratz time" could have. The air was sucked out of the room pretty quick when we were tasked with a weird overworld traversal mission before the rhythm gameplay but the third or fourth leg of that quest decided to randomly not populate an icon on the minimap like all the others had. We walked around for like 10 minutes trying to find where we were supposed to be. This stung extra hard for me since it was the first game I picked up after Unbeatable. 

    I finally got into the rhythm part and was met with the very simplified inputs I was expecting and okay with but those inputs were tied to rather uninspired music.

99. South of Midnight

    I really hope Compulsion Games gets a chance to make another game. South of Midnight was a game I was real hot on prior to its launch. I love the setting and the lore seemed interesting to me. Unfortunately, the gameplay really fell flat for me. The combination of awkward first-game problems like traversal clunkiness and rather uninteresting combat made this the first game of the year that I really wanted to play through but just fell off and couldn't force myself back into.

    I struggled for a while to articulate my thoughts about the specific aspects of the experience that didn't click for me but ultimately I think it came down to mechanical character design. You give me, the player, a pull, a push, a charm, a stun, AoE, etc. and want them all to feel impactful but then you strap a weird cooldown system to it that makes the whole thing feel awkward.

    I think the limiter on a player's power fantasy in a single-player game should be the enemies that player faces and not the timers and bars you strap that player's abilities with. This isn't a PvP experience or even an ARPG where you want to more strategically gate my access to these things. I think about how I'd feel playing through Super Mario Odyssey if Cappy had a 3 second cooldown after returning to Mario's head.

    Enemy variety was also lacking in a way that exacerbated the above. Each enemy felt like its own thing designed to be friction to me as the player but not to be friction to the abilities I possess. More cohesive combat that played with enemies who felt more naturally opposed to my character mechanically might have made for a better experience.

98. Wanderstop

    I enjoy a good cozy game and I love a good cup of tea. I thought Wanderstop would be my... cup of... tea??? Sadly, its gameplay loop never quite clicked with me. Through multiple attempts to get into Wanderstop, I found myself always leaving it unsure if I was enjoying it or not.

    "Be a tea farmer and talk through the problems of others' struggles" sounds so appealing to me that I kept forcing myself back into Wanderstop after I'd have given up on other games. I love the visual style and it's a world I wanted to spend time enveloping myself in. Sadly, the mundanity of the moment-to-moment gameplay left my mind wandering away from the stories around me. I think the developers want some level of this feeling, given Boro's references to boring moments being what Alta needs, but a boring moment for the character being a boring moment for me, the player, does not resonate quite as well.

97. NASCAR 25

    I have fond memories of both Days of Thunder for the NES and Nascar '05 Chase for the Cup. Every 15 years or so I'm interested in checking out a NASCAR game. I'm not a particularly big fan of the sport, but I do enjoy a good racing game.

    I admit to not putting a whole lot of time into this game. I found its gameplay a little too in the weeds for someone who is a fairly casual observer and the 45 minutes or so I spent racing around a track lacked a moment-to-moment tension I was hoping to find in a breakneck racing game. I don't think it helped that it's now been so long since I had any interest in NASCAR that I didn't recognize the names of most of the drivers.

    The pre-release coverage I'd seen made me aware that the franchise has been in some turmoil over the years but this release seemed to be looking promising. NASCAR 25 was my first dive back in to the franchise since Chase for the Cup and will likely be my last. I think the appeal of a NASCAR game has passed me by.

96. Fragpunk

    I love competitive shooters. I love watching esport titles. I don't typically enjoy playing round-based shooters like Fragpunk or Counter-Strike but still enjoy watching them quite a bit. Give me a nice arena shooter, however, and I'm all over it.

    I ultimately fell off of Fragpunk after a few hours across its launch week. I couldn't get past the round-based nature of the game creating too much "hurry up and wait" with constant interruptions to the action. This, obviously, wouldn't be a turn-off for fans of most tac shooters.

    I really liked the idea of the card system they added and found it to be a great infusion of variance and decision making to the formula. It does, however, add another layer to the game predicated on good communication with your team. I think anyone reading this is likely to understand the downsides that can introduce. I was unable to convince my friends to try it out with me so I was stuck playing solo in a game that really wants more cohesive play than a group of randoms thrown together.

    I like the visual style of the game and heroes and thought there was some interesting stuff with mechanical class design as well. None of that was enough to keep me engaged with the game though. I get the impression that it's competitive scene never really took off either, which is a shame, since it's a game I could totally get behind watching at a high level. 

95. Mika & The Witch's Mountain

    Mika might be the cutest game I've played all year. I absolutely love the visuals and art in this game. I just wish every other aspect of the game had been approached with the same steadfast ambition. Gameplay was repetitive and characters didn't get any room to shine through boring dialogue and storytelling in a world that was ultimately not memorable across its short runtime.

    The navigation of the world on the broom left a lot to be desired. There were poorly bound objects all around that left me awkwardly colliding with misaligned hitboxes that brought my movement to a sudden stop. Even when I was not colliding with things that I definitely didn't hit, I still felt misaligned with the world. A rather sparse environment meant that my frame of reference for my 3-dimensional movement lacked a real solid anchor.

    While I certainly appreciate a game that can tell an impactful story and introduce me to characters with substance while also keeping its runtime short, Mika fails to do the former. This one felt a little too short, or perhaps just not enough time was given to the character development of the people you interact with, or maybe the game just lacked an amount of levity it needed to make me feel invested. I'm not entirely sure what it was that didn't work about the story here for me but I can say now that writing this review some 10 months after I played it, I'm struggling to remember most of it.

94. Atomfall

    Rebellion's Sniper Elite series has never really clicked for me. I love so many of the ideas it presents but I always find myself lost in decision paralysis of approaching a mission and then butting heads with the stealth elements. Atomfall has all of that DNA in it, from rather shoddy player detection logic that can be downright immersion-breaking to presenting too much forest without teaching me to appreciate the trees.

    I tried Atomfall in hopes that the world would feel interesting enough for me to not mind re-trudging it since something about this style of game brings out the "restart until you do it exactly how you want" monster in me. While I did find its atmosphere fascinating, I found its storytelling to be woefully drab and its skill system was nearly offensive. What do you mean I can miss entire skill trees because I didn't find the training manual? When you create an open world, it should be so engaging the player explores it to experience it and not to avoid being punished for not.

93. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves

    When 96% of SNK was purchased by the Saudi Arabian government, they assured players that there would be no impact on the content of their games. This feels like such an enormous lie in the face of City of the Wolves existing in the state it does.

    Fighting games often have some of their highest moments in the ways they integrate crossovers and guest characters into their game systems and represent those characters in a new light. SNK has a storied history of phenomenal crossovers. Surely this means City of the Wolves would be getting them as well. So, who did SNK get for the crossovers in this game? They've had whole games with Marvel characters so was it Iron Man? Wolverine? Do we see them dipping into the well of other fighting games?

    Enter Christiano Ronaldo, professional soccer player for... the Saudi Pro League fresh off the heels of sexual assault allegations by multiple women in 2017 and 2021. Right... this feels like exactly the crossover I was hoping for. Fear not though, we were also getting Salvatore Ganacci, a DJ who plays live shows at LIV Golf events run by the Saudi government.

    While I find these inclusions no less than brazenly offensive and a stain on a franchise with a history I have a fair bit of fondness for, I'll admit to rather enjoying the gameplay of this one. There's a really intricate fighting game here and while I find that intriguing, I can see it causing frustration for a new player. It's just a shame that I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone.

92. Rogue: Genesia

    My hatred for the term "X-like" in describing a game will push me to calling this one a "bullet heaven" but there are elements found here from other roguelite genres that are intertwined with these systems as well. I cannot bring myself to tell you "It's kinda like a survivors-like mixed with a slay the spire-like" when what should matter to you, the player, is that you're moving around a node-based map and choosing encounters that range from upgrades to your abilities to combat stages where you are moving around a map and avoiding being hit by swarms of enemies as you attempt to hit them with your abilities.    

    I do want to compliment the end result of this game made by solo dev Ouadi Huard, as I think it's a great accomplishment just finishing a project and releasing it. Lord knows I can never get that kind of drive on any ideas I have. If I struggle with the placement of any one game in this list, it's whether I want to keep Rogue: Genesia so low or bump it up like 30 spots in acknowledgement of the parts of this game that feel like such great integrations of the best parts of so many other titles adjacent to this one.

    Ultimately, it ended up so low on my list because it's a game designed to keep you coming back for "just one more run" and it really didn't do that with me. I'm not sure I disliked any one part of my time with Rogue: Genesia but I'm also not sure I wouldn't rather have that time back to spend on other games on this list. I played quite a few similar action-oriented roguelites this year that I found to be more memorable.

    While there is great build diversity to be found here, I had problems with the visual clutter of the game's vfx layering. A finer pass on cleaning up overlapping visuals and slightly reducing the sheer amount of noise on the screen would be great. Part of this problem is a direct side effect of just how crazy the scaling in this game gets. I often found myself overwhelmed at the visual mess simply because I was so powerful that the game had stopped being a thing of intrigue and transitioned into sheer spectacle. Its UI was similarly over-done and complex.

91. Warriors: Abyss

    Another action roguelite, though more similar to Hades or TMNT: Splintered Fate than Vampire Survivors or Rogue: Genesia but this game takes all your favorite Dynasty Warriors characters and tries a musou-inspired spin on the whole thing. I absolutely love musou games and this game was right up my alley on paper.

    Unfortunately, Warriors Abyss is severely held back by individual stages that are far too quick to end, leading to very segmented "stop-start-stop-start" loops. Mowing down hundreds of dudes at a time is cool when done well but when I don't get to do it for more than a minute or two at a time, is it worth the time spent choosing upgrades?

    On the topic of upgrades, this game's only drawback I found even bigger than its gameplay pacing was its absolutely atrocious unlock system. The ridiculous web of upgrades and character unlocks all woven into one big menu was no less than utterly confusing and so overwhelming that I ultimately quit playing specifically because of the progression system being such an uninspired mess rather than more broken-out and tighter systems designed to intertwine with one another naturally.

90. Nubby's Number Factory

    There's a lot to unpack here. While Nubby's Number Factory doesn't really do anything terribly wrong in its implementation of its various systems, it also fails to really do anything that hasn't been done in so many other roguelikes I've already played.

    I found myself hitting a state with Nubby where I wasn't even really paying attention to the game, so much as just waiting for the next time the number went up. I felt like I was just sitting at a slot machine and idly pulling the lever. There's tons of depth here but nothing to make me care about any of it.

    I found the visuals downright off-putting. I'm not a fan of the "an eyesore because it's supposed to be an eyesore" kind of look that MogDogBlog went with here. I think anyone who found something to like in this game would be better served playing Ballionaire.

89. Abyssus

    Yet another game that is technically "fine" but weighed down by unexciting systems design. Abyssus tries to do the co-op roguelite shooter thing like Gunfire Reborn or Crab Champions but doesn't do it as well as either of those titles.

    This game looks great. Everything does have a bit of that "default asset store object" look to it, but there's nothing bad about its visuals. They've put together a visually cohesive world with great fidelity. However, I do find it all to feel just a bit soulless in motion.

    Abyssus' biggest flaw, for me, was in its quest design. Many objectives they give you for a clear condition of a given zone just feel obtusely designed to tax the player of heals before presenting them a boss fight, rather than allowing the player a challenging circumstance to showcase their master of teh game's movement and gunplay.

    Speaking of gunplay, this was an area that felt similar to the visuals for me. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the combat in Abyssus. It is technically sound. However, it lacks a refinement that allows it to shine. At its best moments, the game can feel like the same kind of fever dream flowstate one can find themselves in when playing DOOM. However, those highs come only after getting used to floaty feeling mouse movement that often left me wishing the game was just the slightest bit tighter. The gunplay felt more similar to Roboquest but just not as nicely tuned.

    Its upgrades in-run felt interesting the first couple times I played but I found myself getting too many repeats too early and build pathing was not as diverse as I'd have liked. There's only so many times I can build around one of a few elemental types and feel obligated to hard force that modifier moving forward before I move on. If you look up "uninspired" in a dictionary, you're likely to find a photo of the upgrade system in  Abyssus.

    Unfortunately, my experience with Abyssus was rife with bugs. I'd like to think they ironed a fair bit of this out over time, but I've not been inspired enough by it to return to find out. In the ten hours or so I spent playing this both solo and with friends, we encountered health bars that were not accurately reflecting how much health we actually had, one player got clipped into a wall and couldn't get out which was hilarious but also prevented us from moving forward, and UI timers that just didn't work.

88. A Game About Digging A Hole

    It hurt putting this game as low as I have. However, there's nothing that stands out and its very short runtime left me thinking "Man, if they fixed the egregious object collision problems, I'd love to play a lot more of this."

    The biggest problem I had during my time here was that there are no physics on anything you dig. There are going to be way too many times that you have a problem getting out of or entering a mine because you're getting blocked by microscopic bits of dirt you missed in a prior pass. This feels absolutely atrocious and frustrated me so much.

    The ending of the game, however unimportant, isn't something I'm going to spoil should someone want to play it, but I did find it incredibly jarring and unsatisfying. It made me just sit there for a couple minutes not knowing what to think and then I uninstalled.

87. Reignbreaker

    I enjoyed the first few hours I put into Reignbreaker, but ultimately its lack of build diversity and grindy meta-progression system churned me out. I quite enjoyed the soundtrack though.

    For a game that's trying to do its best Hades, it had the unfortunate luck of releasing in the same year as Hades II. A decent action roguelite if you've played literally every other action roguelite and haven't gotten enough yet, but otherwise forgettable.

86. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

    Aside from some spotty performance issues on PC, there's nothing really wrong with Oblivion Remastered. I certainly have no nostalgia for the franchise, as this was actually my first experience with any Elder Scrolls game except the CCG, Elder Scrolls Legends.

    I'm not generally a fan of immersive RPGs and Bethesda makes a lot of games that just don't appeal to me at all. I tried this one out because I had Game Pass anyway and I was on a quest to give honest tries to games I'd normally look right past.

    I'm sure for the people who might be into this kind of game, it's a solid example of such a thing and worth a play, but it certainly was not for me. I did find the visuals quite spectacular though, so there's that I guess.

85. Eternal Strands

    Eternal Strands offered what started as a compelling narrative and intriguing gameplay. I was digging the story and really enjoying the elemental aspects of the combat. That never felt to really expand though and the rest of the experience sort of flatlined around it. Props to the quality of the voice actors though. They sounded great despite having to deliver some rather flat lines at times.

    There are a lot of "First Game" problems with this one that I hope the devs get a chance to address in another title. Traversal is terribly unpleasant, with the character lacking any sort of weight within the world and plenty of wonky clipping and hitbox problems to match.

    When originally playing through this game, I was enjoying it for the first couple hours before I described it to a friend as "something about Eternal Strands reminds me of Kena Bridge of Spirits in a way that makes me go "I like the idea of this... I don't think I want to play it" and I think that description holds up over time. 

    There are play patterns here that are worth exploring and iterating on but hopefully next time they're packaged with a lot more polish. The big Shadow of the Colossus-inspired fights against a giant boss are where the game shines for me and there's just not nearly enough of that part of the game.

84. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

    Life is Strange took me a few tries to really get into but when I did, with True Colors, I devoured the series. This is one I was really looking forward to. I ended up not even playing the second half of the game.

    The story in Bloom & Rage is a wildly inconsistent experience ranging from "some of the best character writing I've seen in a game" to "abysmal establishment of the overarching plot" and that clash left me constantly aware of just how much better the entire thing could be.

    Dialogue would sometimes be unnaturally paced in a way that wasn't quite the "intentionally awkward" tone I'd come to expect from this team but rather felt like there just wasn't enough attention paid in QA to make sure dialog triggers were moving conversation forward naturally. None of this is helped by the VO work that mostly didn't sound properly mastered. I picked up on weird static during spoken word more than once.

    I loved the use of the camcorder. That was fun and allowed me the most opportunity to put myself in the world and see it through my character. The dialogue system itself was impressive as well. Perhaps Don't Nod should have strayed a bit further from their roots for this project.