Congratulations on making it through the 1st quarter of the DCL Season! This is what I would consider our first major milestone in the season and a great place to start and see if we can determine how the standings in our league will take shape.
As of March 30th, this is how the league is stacking up:
And here are the games that released this month:
- Thaumaturge: 4.7
- Expeditions: A MudRunner Game: 9.3
- Unicorn Overlord: 18.0
- Alone in the Dark: -6.7
- Rise of the Ronin: 6.2
- Dragon’s Dogma 2: 17.6
- Princess Peach Showtime!: 5.9
- Pepper Grinder: 8.9
- Open Roads: 1.3
I think we were all anticipating the three-way showdown this past month between Adam’s “Dragon’s Dogma 2” (17.6), Adam’s “Rise of the Ronin” (6.2), and Nate’s “Princess Peach Showtime!” (5.9). And while I think anyone can find enjoyment from any of those games, it seems pretty clear that the Capcom sequel came through with the most praise from critics and fans, despite some of the technical performance issues.
March also brought with it a few counter-picks – and those counter-picks definitely shook up the scores of their respective teams. “Expeditions: A MudRunner Game” meant -9.2 points for Adam’s team, while Nate’s team picked up 6.7 points for counter-picking Alone in the Dark. (I’m pretty sure he called this game a turd sandwich during our draft night…looks like he wasn’t wrong!) Eddie meanwhile counter-picked Pepper Grinder which resulted in -8.9 points for his team. Yikes!
The other big game for the month of March was Unicorn Overlord (18.0) from Vanillaware. I wasn’t sure whether this would be a slam dunk success, but I seems to be exactly that for Micah’s team. That, along with Pepper Grinder, has brought a total of 26.9 points for Micah’s team this month!
But now, onto April and the start of Q2. There are (as of now) 8 releases for April in our league. What’s most interesting to me is that this month doesn’t feature any Big AAA games but rather several much smaller titles. These three are the ones that I’ve focused on and the ones I’m particularly interested in seeing how they review/score in OpenCritic.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU [Surgent Studios / Electronic Arts] (Jeff – Wolfpack Games)
Featured at The 2023 Game Awards and being funded under the EA Originals label, most of us were introduced to this game via Abubakar Salim (voice of Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins) who founded this studio and created this game. This game is inspired by the feelings of grief Salim felt at the loss of his father. What’s more interesting to me however, is that this game seems to be a pretty competent Metroidvania and I’m interested to see how reviewers think of this game after already reviewing a great new Metroidvania earlier in January with “Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown”.
Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes [Rabbit and Bear Studios / 505 Games] (Josh – Homie Don’t Play Games)
This game was funded on Kickstarter back in July, 2020 and quickly became a highly anticipated video game due to its creator: Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of the Suikoden series and director of Suikoden I & II. After a couple of delays and then the passing of Murayama-san earlier this year, the game is ready to release! The JRPG is featuring an interesting mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D sprites, it’s promising flashy and deep turn-based combat mechanics with up to 6 party members at a time, all while still promising 100+ meaningful characters, as well as the complex and intriguing political story we have come to expect from a Suikoden successor. I know that I (as a backer myself) am pumped up and ready to see how this game has turned out! We’ll find out on April 23rd.
Stellar Blade [Shift Up / S.I.E.] (Micah – Dougsvest Digital)
Stellar Blade has drawn a lot of attention from gamers since its initial announcement as Project EVE back in 2019 and the subsequent presentation during the September 2021 PlayStation Showcase when it was announced to be a PlayStation exclusive. It looks to be a good mix of RPG (e.g. NIER: Automata), and action game (e.g. Bayonetta). This is probably the highest profile game that is releasing in the month – seeing as Sony is promoting and helping to fund the game – and it will be interesting to see if the Action-RPG is more style, substance, or hopefully a rich mix of both.
Okay! That’s all that I have for this month’s newsletter. As promised, I’m also including some aggregated stats of the season thus far through Q1. (see below)
Take care & God Bless,
Alex C.
Deer Critics League 