With a release date for Diablo 4 still incoming, and Torchlight III stumbling in its attempt to fill its vacuum, there’s room on the Xbox for a loot-driven brawler. The people at Lion Castle Entertainment clearly get it. It looks funny and throwaway, and all the time trials and various modes are present and correct. If you want to catapult over half the game’s map by ramp, then Taxi Chaos gives you the thumbs up. This is frantic, and the physics are wonderfully over-the-top – as they should be.
While it doesn’t win points for originality, Taxi Chaos gets plenty for understanding what made Crazy Taxi so good in the first place. Perhaps we should just be thankful that SEGA didn’t throw litigation their way. You almost wonder why SEGA didn’t throw some cash at Lion Castle Entertainment to make it a fully fledged sequel. You’re in a chunky yellow taxi, tearing your way through a city in the hunt for passengers, dumping them off at their destination before the ticking clock completes its final tick. This is Crazy Taxi through and through, save – perhaps – for the ‘90s pop-punk soundtrack. No prizes for guessing where Taxi Chaos’s influences lie. Your travels will take you to sinister schools, creepy woodlands and more, as Little Nightmares II escapes the claustrophobia of the original.
The role-call of beasties include The Doctor, who crawls along the ceilings of his practice The Thin Man, floating around in his posh get-up, searching for something mysterious, and Teachers, who have a taste for corporal punishment, wielding canes. She can’t solve this herself, as she’s on the brink of fading out of reality, Back to the Future style, so it’s down to Mono.Īs with Little Nightmares, it’s all about where you go and what you’re trying to avoid. Six is fading out of the world, and it seems the blame for this falls on The Signal Tower, which is distorting the world with a mysterious broadcast. Instead, Little Nightmares II introduces Mono, a boy with a box on his head. Six, the girl in the yellow raincoat, is also back, but you won’t necessarily be playing as her. The first was something of a sleeper hit, and OG devs Tarsier Studios are back on board. Grotesque puzzle-platformer Little Nightmares gets a sequel this month, and it’s going to be the highlight of February for many. It’s not the first console that modern games look to emulate, and we can’t recall many games that have attempted it. Still, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust has originality on its side and, frankly, it nails the N64 aesthetic. Not the first job we’d choose in a sci-fi futurescape. There’s story reasons for it all of course, as you’re a nano cleaner in the land of New Theland, which effectively means you’re Dennis Quaid in Innerspace, shrinking down to insert yourself into the ill. Oh, and your character can morph into a car at will for fast-travel purposes.
Instead, what we have is a 3D adventure game that’s trying to capture the fuzzy polygonal look of an N64 title, and – when you dive into the bodies of characters in that world – the entire art style shifts into the 2D Zelda view, and you play through their bodily organs like a dungeon. That game was a straight Zelda clone, but Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is not willing to repeat the trick. This is the sequel to Anodyne, which was always a brave name to give a game, considering it essentially means ‘somewhat dull’. February comes packaged with three ‘so willfully bonkers that they have to be played’ games, and the first is Anodyne 2: Return to Dust.