Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).

Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters (Mega Drive)

 I've really been enjoying the current rennaissance that the Mega Drive is going through. The past few years have seen new games getting released for the thirty-seven-year-old console, with even industry veterans like Yuzo Koshiro being involved in new games, the officially-sanctioned port of the original Darius released on the Mega Drive Mini, and even indie games like Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon Fist Master getting full cartridge releases with boxes and manuals (meaning that this indie game on an ancient console comes as a more complete package than almost all games on modern systems).

 

It's unfortunate, then, that Kunio no Nekketsu School Fighters is a fangame, made purely out of love for fighting games and for the Kunio-kun series in particular (and the love for both those things is very evident). Unfortunate because it's one of the best fighting games on the Mega Drive, and almost definitely the most fully-featured. It's got all kinds of stuff, that was uncommon, if not unheard of in the time when fighting games were being commercially released on Mega Drive: there's alpha counters, forwards and backwards dashing, dodge rolls, super moves, taunting, and so on. 
It looks great, too, with all the characters being really well animated, stages that show the passage of time between stages, and lots of cool little stylistic flairs like little manga sound effects appearing when attacks land, and so on. There's even unique pre-fight interactions for certain pairs of characters! All of this would be pointless if it weren't fun to play, which luckily isn't a problem. The fights are fast, the controls work perfectly, the characters all feel different to play, it never feels unbalanced or unfair. Really, the only negative I can think of to say about how it plays is that while everything it does is incredibly well executed, none of it is particularly original. It might have had more of its own identity if it had introduced at least one new or unusual mechanic.

 

Even that criticism is taking into account the fact that the game came out in 2025, and that we can all play hundreds of fighting games across many different host systems. Specifically as a Mega Drive fighting game, it definitely stands out from the crowd by having all of those aforementioned features coupled with the flawless execution, and if it had been released thirty years earlier, it would have absolutely blown minds. Obviously, it couldn't have come out thirty years ago, though, for many reasons related to both technological proliferation and socio-economic factors. I'm not certain on this, but I don't think there would have been many avenues for an independent developer in Brazil to make a commercial-quality fighting game for the Mega Drive in 1995, let alone for that game to be released to the world.

 

Which is why it's such a shame that this is a fangame! I'd love to be able to buy a real copy to play on my real (well, Chinese clone) Mega Drive, and which would make some money for the devs. Hopefully, they'll make more Mega Drive games in the future, and those ones belong solely to them, to sell as they will. Obviously, I very much recommend this game, especially since it's free/pay-what-you-want. I've enjoyed it a great deal, and I look forward to whatever the devs bring out in the future.

Karous (Dreamcast)

 You might notice that the screenshots on this review are a combination of arcade and Dreamcast shots. This is due to my own technological ineptitude, and it doesn't really matter, since I mostly played the Dreamcast version and that's what I'm writing about, and also they're identical anyway, the only difference being that the Dreamcast version has a fanmade English translation. 

 

Karous is from Milestone, a developer mostly known for shooting games, especially their late-release Dreamcast duology, Radirgy and this one. It came out a year after Radirgy, and the first two things you'll notice about it are how much it doesn't look like its forebear (Radirgy had a very colourful Akihabara-inspired look, while Karous goes for a moodier tone, with muted colours and lots of grey), and how much it appears to play like its forebear. 

 

Like Radirgy, Karous arms you with a gun, a sword, and a shield. The gun and sword are each assigned to a button, and the shield appears in front of you when you aren't using either of the other two. You also, like in Radirgy, have a forcefield that projects outtwards to protect you and continually damage any enemies it touches, and it can be used whenever a meter that incrementally fill every time you damage an enemy or cancel an enemy bullet completely fills up. You can even hit power ups and points items with your sword to change them into different things!

 

What's different, though, is the scoring system, which offers a stark contrast to that seen in the earlier game, which had you constantly trying to fill meters as quickly as possible and collect items and so on, and never taking a break. In Karous, the scoring system and the power-up system are linked. Whenever you use one of your three main weapons, they gain experience, and gradually level up (don't worry, it's still a completely linear STG, so there's no grinding and the levelling is more like Radiant Silvergun than an RPG), increasing their power very slightly every time. You also have a constant multiplyer that's made up of all three weapon levels combined. So again, like Radiant Silvergun: playing for survival and playing for score are one and the same. You want you weapons to be more powerful, and making them so is also how you score more points.

 

Though I was initially put off by the miserable look of the game, and the fact that the 3DS sequel/spin-off Karous: The Beast of Re:Eden was awful, but Karous is a game I just keep going back to! The basic Milestone mechanics are enjoyable as they are, and the ways in which it's less stressful than Radirgy have their own appeal, too. You should definitely give it a try!

Soccer Brawl (Neo Geo CD)

I've recently developed an interest in the extra features added to the CD versions of Neo Geo games, and I've long had an interest in the less popular games on consoles that are themselves pretty niche. Soccer Brawl, though it's definitely one of the less popular Neo Geo CD games, unfortunatelly doesn't have much in the way of extras. All there is is some short animations about an unlucky inventor trying to create a soccer-playing robot, that play as half time entertainment.

 

But the games itself is still pretty good! It's one of only three games developed by short-lived SNK sub-studio Pallas, with their most famous release also being a futuristic sports game, 2020 Super Baseball, which is more famous on account of it being ported to SNES and Mega Drive. Despite the name, though, Soccer Brawl isn't as violent as most future sports games based on soccer. There's regular tackling, as well as two other ways to hurt opponents: you if you don't have the ball, you can hold the kick button for a second and release it to fire an energy blast that can stun a player, and if you do have the ball, the same command kicks the ball super-hard (because all of the players are enhanced cyborgs, of course). This super-hard kick is useful for scoring goals, and for knocking down opponents. 

 

There's a couple of interesting things to note about the above, too. The first is that the game does have friendly fire for all forms of attack, so when things are crowded, you might want to be careful. Or alternatively, if you want to score, you might want to kick the ball with no regard as to who might be in the way. The other thing is that among the eight teams, there are four different kinds of super-kicks, there being two teams able to use each one. I think these are activated if you kick the ball at full strangth more than half the field's length away from your opponent's goal. These might have the ball moving in a big circle while on fire before shooting towards the goal, or the ball might split into to balls that dance around each other as they head toward the goal, and so on. Like a regular super-hard kick, these are very useful in both scoring goals, and incapacitating enemy players.

 

Like I said, it's a lot less violent than most games of this type. In all the games I've played, there's been no times where a player had to leave the game from being too beaten up, let alone players getting killed like you might see in some other titles. There is a nice little detail, though: players that have taken damage a few times will start to have smoke or electric sparks coming off of them, suggesting some damage death, or strain being put upon their cybernetic components. I don't think it actually has any effect on their ability to play, but it is a cool detail. I kind of want to say it's a shame that all the teams are just re-coloured sets of the exact same players (albeit with different supers and presumably different stats), but to be fair: we can't really expect a developer to ome up with eight teams' worth of individual characters from nothing, for a game in a genre whos players almost definitely won't notice or care compared to fighting game fans.

 

Soccer Brawl is a pretty fun game! The only big problems I can really accuse it of are ones that are kind of inherent to being a sports game of this type. If one team gets more than a few points ahead and there isn't much time left in the match, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up, but there's no option to concede (or for the game to automatically end early if there's a score gap of a certain size). Furthermore, if you happen to be the player on the upside of such a score gap, you can pretty much stop trying. If the gap's a few points, it's very easy to get the ball and just run around doing nothing to run out the clock, and if the gap's more than that, you can just stop playing and do something else for a while. Still, I've had some fun with it, and it's a nice little, very nineties sci-fi sports game. 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (Playstation)

 There are a few ways I've seen train driving simulators displays things. Polygons are the most common, and there's also a few on less powerful hardware that do sprite scaling (or, on even less powerful hardware, there's imitation sprite scaling). There's also FMV, which I think is most famously used in the Japanese Rail Sim series on 3DS, which use as their graphics actual high quality video footage of real train journeys. 

 

N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton (which is also listed on some sites as "Hassha Ourai! Gatan Goton") uses FMV, but in a move that possibly makes it the cutest of all train driving games, it places you in the cockpits of various model trains, travelling through actual footage of tiny little model towns with cardboard buildings and little plastic construction workers! Despite the use of models, though, I think it's still working under the conceit that you'r driving a real train, as the cockpits surrounding the window in which the FMV plays are unique to each train, and pretty detailed too. The levers and dials move when they're supposed to, there's a little light that comes one when you're meant to start moving, and so on.

 

It's all very cute and charming! The game itself is kind of constrained by being what it is. I guess the train enthusiasts who are the target audience for the genre want exactly one thing from these games and one thing alone: to drive a train in as close a manner to driving an actual game as possible. So, just like Densha De Go and SL De Ikou and all the others, you can control acceleration and brakes, and you've got to get to a series of stations along your route, making sure to keep to the speed limits, arrive as close to exactly on time as you can, and to stop at the exact line on the platform at which you're expected. It does have one difference that makes it stand out from the others in the genre, though: it's a lot easier!

 

Densha De Go, the most famous example of the genre is known for being completely merciless when players don't play completely perfectly. N-Gauge Unten Kibun Game Gatan Goton is a lot more forgiving, though: you can be up to ten seconds late when arriving, and you can go a few metres over the line without getting a game over. Also, on some stages, there's something strange that happens where another train will attach itself to your train and just drive you to the next station, with no input from you necessary. I don't know why this happens, or why you'd put in a part of your game where it essentially just plays itself for part of a stage. 

 

If you've enjoyed literally any other game in this genre, or if you've tried but found them too difficult, then you can probably already figure out if you want to play this one. If not, and you're interested, it's probably a good first game to try out. I've been really enjoying it, and the use of miniatures gives a unique and very appealling look. It's definitely worth your time, I think.

Air Diver (Mega Drive)

 I've started to unkindly describe Ace Combat-style 3D aerial combat games as "slowly following a little dot on your radar waiting until you can actually see and fire a homing missile at the enemy", and while that's pretty bad in actual 3D games with polygon graphics where you and the enemies actually occupy positions in a properly defined space. Air Diver bravely attempts to make a game in that genre using only 2D sprites, which aren't even actually scaling, since it's a Mega Drive game!

 

I can see why the developers wanted to try doing this: Afterburner II is a pretty good game, and it fared surprisingly well in its port to Mega Drive, so why not try putting together a game with the homing missile-based gameplay of Afterburner II, but instead of being a completely linear rail shooter, try and simulate a more realistic scenario, where the same enemy planes can fly all around you? The problem is that becuse this is a faux-sprite scaling game, you can only fly straight ahead, with the ability to kind of do a barrel roll or a loop being the extent of your maneuverability.

 

This means that when enemy planes fly behind you, all you can really do is a loop, to try and fly over and behind them. Or at least, that's what I thought, but this only puts the enemy in front of you some of the time. Similarly, enemies will often fly off to the side, and there's just no effective way to chase them there either. So even worse than chasing the little radar dots, you spend the majority of your time in this game waiting for the dots to place themselves within your field of vision.

 

Making this even worse is the way the stages are structured. There's three parts to each: first, you fight lots of regualr enemy planes, who all die in one hit. Then, a single super-plane, that's a different colour, and takes a bunch of hits to kill. Finally, each stage has some kind of gigantic futuristic sky fortress thing, that's so big it has to be portrayed as a background, rather than a sprite. The super-plane is the hardest of the three on all of the stages I've tried, as the fortresses just need you to constonatly shoot and move until they're dead. No chasing or aiming necessary!

 

Mentioning the fortresses makes me think that I should bring up the game's threadbare, but also absurd plot. A previously unknown terrorist organisation from the middle east has suddenly taken over the entire world. Despite being an unknown, unnamed organisation, they have hundreds (possibly thousands) of fighter planes, as well as the aforementioned giant sky fortresses. The only part of the world left unconquered is an airbase in the south Pacific, from whence a flying transporter containing your plane is deployed to save the world.

 

This does actually bring up a structural point to the game that doesn't make it more fun, but which is slightly interesting. You can tackle the stages in any order, and each one also tells you an estimated chance of success on the world map screen. However, your transport has a limited amount of fuel, and there is, according to the manual, a specific route that you have to figure out to be able to tackle every stage without running out of transporter fuel (which means an instant game over).

 

In case you haven't already figured it out, I didn't really enjoy Air Diver. It's a shame, because it looks kind of cool, and the soundtrack is pretty good, too. But unfortunately, it's a boring, frustrating chore, and not worth your time. I am kind of curious about the two sequels that apparently came out on SNES, though. Which that system's focus on scaling and rotation, maybe it's able to do a better job of realising the developers' ambitions?

Purified (PS Vita)

 

 This game apparently came out a while ago, though I only learned of it last week (and, to be fair, it does still call itself Ver 0.9, so I guess it's still not totally complete). Most PS Vita homebrew so far has been either ports of PC and Android games, or various utilities, with a few fairly small-scale games here and there, too. I don't want to diminish any of those things, they all contribute to making the Vita a fun console to own. But Purified has really blown me away. This could easily have been a full commercial release!

 

It's a third person shooter, with a very turn-of-the-century edgy mallgoth look to it, in which you play as a beefy space-catholic cyborg tasked with killing the endless hordes of demonic cyborgs and their possessed victims that are beseiging the last human city. This war takes the form of three survival skirmish stages, which can be played in any order. You pick one, and you fight against increasingly difficult waves of enemies and sometimes bosses. They aren't endless, as one of the stats tracked is how many times you've won each stage (though my total for all three is still currently zero), and I suspect there might be a secret fourth stage, based on some of the in-game text?

 

Which brings me onto the subject of what an amazingly complete package this game is! As well as the game's three main stages, there's also an optional tutorial stage, which is its own complete map with unique models and textures and stuff. There's a sound test, which lets you listen to the game's soundtrack (obviously), while looking at a rotating 3D model of a soundtrack CD case. There's even an ingame encyclopedia, with pictures and lore for every character, location, weapon, item, and concept in the game! And like you can tell from the screenshots, this looks like an actual game put out by a big company (maybe a game that was put out twenty-five years ago, but a big company game nonetheless). 

 

Is the game actually good, though? Yes! It didn't click with me at first, and a few aspects felt a little clunky, like how you can't just shoot, you have to hole L to aim, then press R to shoot, and you have to press a seperate reload button to reload, rather than the fire button doing it when you're empty. But after a few plays, the game's vision really became clear: you're this big heavy man-monster, you have to consider every action because the actions are weighty. This weight, of course, makes the actions all the more satisfying, and there's some great smaller design decisions that have been made that play into that. For example, the first few enemies in a stage will typically be these skinless people who are much shorter than you and not much threat at all, and those few seconds you get to spend casually walking around, thoughtlessly slicing them up with your melee attack are a very fun warm for what's to come.

 

I definitely recommend this game, I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I think it'll remain a mainstay on my Vita for a long time to come. An interesting thing about its distribution is that while you can get it for free from VitaDB, you can also pay what you want on itch, which I think makes it the only PS Vita game you can digitally buy in 2025! The only really negative thing I have to say about it is that one time I had to exit a stage via the pause menu because something went wrong, and no enemies were spawning!

Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M (3DS)

 It seems slightly incongruous for there to be a first party Nintendo game here, but it's one that doesn't even seem like it's been forgotten in the decade since its release, but rather no-one took any notice of it at all. They did try to build hype for it, and I definitely remember downloading the demo at the time, too. But no-one cared. If people were buying and playing it in 2015, then they weren't talking about it, and with it being a decade old now and with the 3DS having a minor renaissance in 2025 (thanks to the combination of broke nostalgic young people and the high price of new consoles - exactly how "retro gaming" should be!), I still don't see anyone talking about it.

 

Code Name S.T.E.A.M is a turn-based strategy game, with some mild action elements. You control a squad of very toyetic soldiers, with steam-powered armour and weapons. Moving a space uses up one unit of steam, different weapons use different amounts to fire, usually between two and four. Each of your soldiers generates eight steam per turn, and can store up to ten (though these numbers will change slightly as you unlock more equipment). So if you leave a couple of steam units at the end of a turn, they'll carry over into the next turn. Furthermore, when you fire weapons, you don't just select your target and pick "fire" from a menu: you've got to aim and fire yourself, either using a joystick on the touchscreen, or the right analogue stick if you're playing on a New 3DS.

 

I've played about ten stages so far, and all of them have had the goal of getting at least one of your soldiers (or in one case, an escorted non-combatant) to a goal area on the other side of the battlefield. After a few turns, more enemies will start generating on the map, so if you have infinite patience, you could theoretically keep killing them forever. But the battles also tend to be pretty tight, with my guys often just barely crawling over the finish line to end a lot of the battles. I think this whole semi-turn-based approach might be taken from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles series, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I can't completely confirm this. 

 

As well as the toyetic protagonists, the game as a whole has a distinct aesthetic to it, too. The tech is all steam=powered, and your homebase is a blimp, but a lot of the fashion and such looks more inspired by 1930s and 40s military uniforms, and the world in general is a mixture of lots of brss and polished wood, with American and British flags draped everywhere. It kind of brings to mind a theoretical Fallout cartoon, made for an audience of kids in 1994. (I'll take this opportunity to make clear that I don't consider a work to be "steampunk" unless it's explicitly anti-imperialist, and since the aforementioned non-combatant you have to escort is Queen Victoria, this game definitely isn't that.)

 

This is a decent enough game, I guess. Playing through a stage is a decent enough way to pass twenty minutes or so, and there is some satisfaction to be derived from the active aiming, plus some of the sillier weapons are a lot of fun too, like the Lion Launcher (wielded by a lion-man named Lion, it makes him bounce on top of enemies for big damage), and the healing gun. Plus, if you play it, you can put it on your list of "3DS hidden gems" for internet clout, since I haven't seen anyone do that so far. Also uncharacteristically for a first party Nintendo game, you can pick up an actual copy for a pittance, if you are a cartridge-accumulating little freak.

Saikyou! Takada Nobuhiko (SNES)

 The early-mid nineties were a time of great experimentation in the world of professional wrestling, both in terms of presentational style and in terms of the actual way wrestling was done. I think to most western fans, the most famous part of this experimentation is from the hardcore style as seen in ECW, FMW and Big Japan, that would eventually go on to be copied (in a watered-down form) by WWE for their massively popular attitude era. But there were other innovations taking place at that time, including in a Japanese promotion called UWFi, where an almost opposite approach was being taken.

 

UWFi took note of the rising popularity of kickboxing, mixed martial arts, and other legitimate combat sports, and sought to create a wrestling style that emulated them, and it's this style upon which Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko is based. (It also takes the very early nineties approach of only featuring one real wrestler, fighting renamed unlicensed versions of other wrestlers.) Thie results in a game that plays very differently to any other, not least because the UWFi used a completely different ruleset than that seen in mainstream wrestling promotions. Furthermore, the action takes place on a single plane, like a contemporaneous fighting game (but in keeping with the shoot style, there's no jumping and not really any special moves).

 

There are a few rulesets in the game, but the main (and most interesting) one is the main ruleset used by UWFi. Matches have a thirty minute time limit, and wrestlers also start each match with fifteen points each. One point is lost when a wrestler is suplexed, or when they escape a submission hold by grabbing the ropes. Three points are lost if a wrestler is down on the floor long enough for the referee to start the ten count. If a wrestler submits to a hold, fails to answer a ten count, or if they're reduced to zero points, they lose the match. In game terms, the wrestlers have two health bars in addition to the fifteen points. 

 

One of the bars regenerates quickly, and when it's depleted, the wrestler goes down and loses three points, while the player has to hammer their controller buttons to try and get back up before the referee counts to ten. The other bar regenerates very slowly, but it only goes down while a wrestler is in a submission hold. When it runs out, they tap and immediately lose the match. Also, while in a submission hold, both wrestlers' players can use the shoulder buttons to edge closer to the ropes or to the centre of the ring.

 

I wouldn't say this is a fun game exactly, and I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to it after this review. But I am always interested in videogames that have people fighting or engaging in combat sports with rules and win conditions that aren't just the typical fighting game knockouts or standard pro-wrestling rules. So I do recommend playing it at least a couple of times to experience that, and maybe it'll click better for you than it did for me. But that's my opinion on it really: not a game I loved, but a game that's interesting and worthy of attention. Also, I hope I wasn't embarassingly incorrect on all the wrestling history back at the start of the review, this kind of shoot style-stuff is a little outside my normal circle of interest. (A little extra note: though I don't often reply to comments on this blog, I do read and appreciate them all.)