1.5/5 Review

The best way to describe Darkland II is that it’s the platforming equivalent of writing lines in detention.

Snowland Adventure gets points for trying. It’s better than the average sub-£1 game on the Xbox Store, in that it’s colourful and knows its way around a puzzle. But it mostly gets melted away by bugs and a runtime that wouldn’t get you through an episode of Ice Road Truckers. 

There’s no argument for spending £1.69 on Dou. You can’t even point to some easy achievements, as it has none. It’s a clinical, charmless little platformer that pokes you in the ribs and demands that you make pixel-perfect jumps without any feeling of reward for doing so.

Ammo Pigs: Cocked and Loaded is a glitchy mess with little to no incentive to play. Frustrating mechanics with boring gameplay means the final recipe equals a low quality game.

Reviewing Nape Retroverse Collection has felt like running in a really crap marathon. We’re exhausted. None of the four games are good by anyone’s standards, but there’s so much shoddiness crammed into one package that we almost appreciate the effort in producing it.

Do you score a game identically to the game it copies? Mushroom Run 2D is last year’s Fantasy Dash, but with a mushroom. Scoring it lower would be petty, but having been spat out by the same sharp-edged and awkward levels, we’re feeling extremely petty. Please, for the love of endless runners everywhere, please let this be the last Fantasy Dash clone that we have to experience. We’ll give you 79p not to.

Granted, the co-op mode offers a bit of fun, although the language in the game is somewhat fruity to say the least, so you’ll need to pick and choose who you run through this with. All in all though, Breakneck City is a poor game that, frankly, performs badly. 

In a world where eFootball has crashed and burned, Football Cup 2022 could have taken its opportunity. But it’s crocked, about as likely to give you a game of football as Jack Wilshere. It’s unforgivably slow and clumsy, full of cheap goals and easy opponents with no difficulty settings. And to top it all off, it has no multiplayer.

Crazy Trucks is crazy alright, but not in a good way. If you have a regular group of buddies, there is a smidge of fun to be had, but that's mainly down to playing with friends rather than playing the game, to be brutally honest. If you are coming to this as a solo player, I’d give it a miss - the fun on offer here doesn’t really get going, ever.

Guazu: The Rescue is certainly cute. It might be enough for an undiscerning youngster, and it’s barely thirty minutes for some of the easiest Gamerscore around. But we are stretching ourselves here: make no mistake, this glorified student project is more guano than Guazu.

This is a video game experiment: what would happen if you stripped absolutely everything from an endless runner? Some questions weren’t meant to be answered, but Ninja Dash 3D answers it anyway, then charges the price of a Starbucks espresso to observe its findings. Step back, put the wallet back in the pocket, and drop a smoke bomb to make a speedy exit.

Even as a free-to-play game, Magic Nations would have stunk. It has a Scrooge-like approach to rewarding you: it’s a thin trail of breadcrumbs to some slightly larger breadcrumbs. But Magic Nations is £12.49, which gets you a mediocre card game strapped to a microtransaction system that EA would have dismissed.

Smoots Golf wiggles their hips, takes aim, and promptly trips over their golfing shoes and into the water. It feels like Smoots Golf was made by people who don’t like or understand golf, as it lacks the basic features that a golfer needs to play eighteen holes. 

In the end, our sweeping generalisation of 79p games was correct. Monster Blocks: Get 9 Puzzle doesn’t come with achievements, and it’s colourful but with no substance, like a Smartie with the chocolate sucked out.

Tony and Clyde is a frustrating, repetitive and frankly offensive game. I can't in all good faith recommend it.