amphibious_ReViews

I stopped playing Fire Emblem Heroes around the same time I stopped participating in the Microsoft Rewards program. Those two things were starting to take over all of my free time, and I needed some reprieve. While I have a history of gacha-style games latching themselves to my daily routines, I foolishly didn't expect this one to manage that. I've never been able to get into tactics games before, and I assumed the same would apply here. In fact, the only reason I started playing it was for the My Nintendo rewards points! However, the game's story and the greater Fire Emblem lore that it draws upon started drawing me in, and before I knew it, I was hooked. Now, while I'm shelving Heroes, I have a new, genuine interest in trying out some of the mainline games. For an aggressively monetized mobile game to be the thing that finally helped me enjoy the tactics genre, it must be doing something very right. Part of that may be its simplicity. In other tactics games that I'

I started playing Microsoft Jewel 2 through the Xbox app because it earned me Microsoft rewards points that I could use to buy Xbox games. At first, I avoided playing it because I knew I'd have to write a review, but I obviously caved. The Microsoft Rewards program has since been seriously nerfed, so I stopped participating and no longer have much of an incentive to play this generic, yet enjoyable, puzzle game. Thus, I am now facing the consequences. I'm not actually disappointed to be writing a review, I just wish it were about something with a little more spirit. Microsoft Jewel 2 does everything it needs to in order to be a passable match-3 puzzle game, but not much more. The game starts you with a screen full of colorful jewels, a level progress bar, and a set of three challenges. Jewels can swap places with any of their adjacent, non-diagonal neighbors, as long as at least one of the jewels being swapped creates a line of three or more like-colored jewels. That line is th

I don't think 2D Metroid could be in a better place than it is right now. Thanks to the Switch's massive install base and the excellent work done by the team at MercurySteam, Metroid Dread has sold better than any other game in the series, potentially introducing tens of thousands of new players to the series. While there were a few things that kept it behind Metroid Fusion as my favorite entry, the transition to 2.5D started by Samus Returns has been fully realized here, and it's absolutely glorious. I know this kind of game won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I think Metroid Dread is exactly what we needed to make sure that people who might fall in love with the series actually get a chance to do so. Picking up after the events of Metroid Fusion, Samus, still genetically fused with Metroid DNA, and ADAM, now integrated into the ship's computer, receive a distress signal from an unfamiliar planet. Within the distress call was an image of an x-parasite, prompt