Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the latter two games, it's just that I don't think they are either particularly balanced or tactical, and I was looking forward to a game less about spamming hadokens and more about outwitting your opponent on the battlefield. Thanatos does not deliver in that aspect.
The game experience is most similar to those old-style cartoon fight scenes where the characters involved just sort of dissolve into a cloud of dust and moving fists. Here's how you play Thanatos: spam special attack ad nauseam, repeat. Between the smoke clouds and tiny characters, good luck following anything that's happening.
I understand that my opinion on Brawl and Street Fighter doesn't exactly coincide with the popular opinion, so take what I say about Thanatos, which appears to have combined the worst aspects of both, with a grain of salt, but I can't recommend it.
Moving on, The Bowling Ninja...
for all my banging of the "DigiPen <3 Ikaruga" drum, I do have to admit that there are a few games on this list that try to get away from that stereotype. For example, The Bowling Ninja is Ikaruga in reverse! Seriously, I'm not stretching this point just to be funny; if I tell you that a game is about destroying things with projectiles based on their color and that the color of the projectile must coincide with the color of the object, what do you think of? Now add in the fact that projectiles tend to quickly fill up the screen, and you've got a pretty good match.
Anyway, you are a ninja with an unlimited supply of bowling balls of four different colors. You throw those bowling balls at other ninjas, who are destroyed if hit with a bowling ball that matches their color. This is an interesting concept, at least, but the game design seems rather self-destructive. The bowling balls can bounce off walls, and when they do, they turn from colored to grey, and grey bowling balls can one-shot any incoming enemy, so rather than strategically placing your shots like the designers ostensibly planned, you end up just spamming balls and spinning in a circle until every threat around you dies.
So yeah, this may be fun for a few minutes, but just pressing the same buttons over and over can get really stale really fast, so the game is not helped by the fact that each level does nothing but introduce a greater quantity of enemies you must defeat to move on. I wouldn't necessarily call the game overly frustrating, but it does a terrible job of motivating the player to continue.
So, today we had two games with relatively similar pros and cons: graphical style that resembles the dooldes of a bored 4th grader (though I can't really blame them, each coming out more than 6 years ago), repetitive and boring gameplay, and a failure to impart a feeling of agency onto the player. These games aren't terrible, but they're at least below average compared to the others on the list. That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay scribbled
Links
Overused Greek Word: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=517
The Beginning of The end of Creative Naming: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=455
