I run into this issue from time to time where a game just doesn't have enough meaningful content to discuss in a broad, long review. Having hit on two of these games in a row, and having posted nothing in months, I guess I'll lump these two together.
An Imp? A Fiend is about the easiest game type in the universe to review. It is a torture platformer, more in line with Super Meat Boy than something like There Was a Caveman, which I enjoyed a heck of a lot more than either of the former. This is a platformer with rotating saw blades, double jump, wall jump and a lot of the usual suspects. Pixel artwork, boilerplate soundtrack, etc.
The game is... Bad sort of in relative terms. There's nothing really distinguishing here, except that your imp is pretty good in a fight, but the game is just a bit of a chore without much pay off. Screens are filled with enemies, which is lame, but the real bummer is when you get to the first town and basically no one says anything. Just screen after screen to waddle through, with NPCs that shouldn't be in the game and extra busywork. For the one town you acquire the key, but you have to thaw the key out, only nothing really implies this... So you just wander around til you find that exact spot and yeah it's pretty not great.
I got about thirty minutes of amusement here. The controls are good, and I like how your little imp doesn't exactly feel like a slouch, but eventually you start smashing your face into screens filled with spikes and saws, and it's just not that exciting. That's all there is to the game, but it's not really quite as quick or nuanced as better versions of the genre. It feels like it could use a bit more polish and a lot more consideration of game flow.
Astral Breakers is a tetris vein puzzle game of ... Oddly limited means. I was fiddling around with the new Genesis Hub thing where I have a copy of Columns, and the game is very reminiscent more of Columns somehow than pure Tetris ... But even then not all that much.
Basically you drop 1 singular colored block at a time, which is unusual. The blocks are completely nonreactive and won't disappear by themselves. At seemingly random points, the game gives you the breaker power up, which you can enable with a keystroke. The power up is added to whatever color you currently have, and it 'breaks' all connected blocks of that color. You can aim the powered up blocks at blocks of another color, they won't break, and this - in theory - sets up the combo system.
As far as I can tell, the game is about that. You can set up combos by having 'breaker' blocks set up to fall on their matching color, but I honestly found this just about never happened, because you're always competing against an opponent and whenever they do a break random crap spews on your screen.
Oh, and the game has an adoreable little intro video with a little star. D'awww.
Frankly, this game is probably a good introduction to puzzle games since it feels very under your control, but it's not a Tetris, not a columns and definitely not a Bejeweled. Maybe if you wanna give a kid a non-violent but simple game, it would work there, but for me there's just not enough to recommend it.
Anyway, I generally wouldn't recommend either of these games. An Imp? is a decent torture platformer, but I'm a poor judge of the genre since I hate these kinds of games. Astral Breakers is just too simple for its own good. It just doesn't grab you, even though it is a quality presentation.
Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.
