John Farrell
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GamingTrendLatest Reviews
Fitness Boxing
Fitness Boxing 3’s weak voice work and shoddy motion detection somehow do little to keep you coming back for more. By gamifying the exercise, it keeps you engaged and motivated, and you’ll quickly find yourself surprised at how tired you become from these exercises.
Romancing Saga 2 - Revenge of the Seven is a brilliant culmination of many of my favorite aspects of JRPGs. While I have some complaints about technical issues and details about implementation, the quality of mechanics and exploration easily blow past them. Fans of the genre will not be disappointed...
The Making of Karateka is a step forward for game’s preservation and interactive documentaries. Digital Eclipse has given us an inkling to what might turn into a new age of storytelling, adding up to far more than just a remaster. Combining remade videogames, interviews, and original documents, this offering is...
Wrath of the Righteous is a deep, engaging, faithful recreation of the tabletop campaign with only minor flaws. Its Crusade system is imperfect and the learning curve is more of a mountain, but the reward for getting through both is a long experience with incredible replay value. I know I...
Solasta: Crown of the Magister may become one of my favorite CRPGs ever, though it isn’t there yet. Its adaptation of D&D 5th edition is as impressive as it is incomplete. Its campaign is as mechanically creative as it is narratively uninspired. I had a great time playing through this...
Trials of Fire
Trials of Fire is a new legend for single-player strategy. Combining all the best of tactical board game combat, deck-building, and narrative, this game is a contender for best roguelikes available right now. It does have some flaws that keep me from recommending it categorically, but nothing that overwhelms the...
Ring of Pain
Ring of Pain shows creativity and promise, but all to little depth to carry those qualities through. The choices presented by the game are interesting in principle, but in practice your success or failure are determined by luck more than anything else. The result is a game defined by repetition,...
Neverending Nightmares is suffused with dread, from its haunting soundtrack to its (mostly) stylistic artistry, but it fails to deliver a compelling experience. Despite its short run-time, the game often feels like it is dragging, tense buildups of tension becoming overladen with monotony. A true horror fan will thank themselves...
Warhammer 40k Mechanicus contains a bevy of interesting narrative and mechanical decisions, but this tactics game is also marred by questionable implementations of those decisions. This Switch port often feels poorly thought out, but if you can make your way past its annoyances, you will find an engaging experience, filled...
The Stretchers
The Stretchers may not be the deepest experience, but its creativity comes through in spades, giving you a great challenge to experience with a friend. Its solo mode doesn’t function well, the game is overall fairly short, and the controls are not always reliable, but the game manages to pack...
Rad
For a small asking price, Rad will reliably give you a few hours of novelty, as you explore the wasted punk-dystopia and mutate yourself to better clear the land of its inhabitants. Beyond that initial entry point, you will find yourself dogged by an experience that has little to offer...
Tesla vs. Lovecraft is imbued with a frenetic, bold energy that I only wish its designers had committed to more strongly. While there is fun in the premise of knocking back waves of Lovecraftian horrors while teleporting around them and maximizing Tesla’s devices, none of these concepts ever truly hits...
