By Nelson Schneider - 03/31/19 at 02:33 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is for fools, as we all know all too well. Too bad the fools in the games industry (and American government) can’t keep their idiocy contained to a single month! Let’s take a look at how big the dumpster fire will be over the course of the next 4 weeks.
Shovelware is much lighter on the ground for April than it was for March, with only three titles. One, “UglyDolls: An Imperfect Adventure,” is based on the series of plushies that is, apparently, supposed to help post-Millennial kids come to terms with how Effed-up they are. Another, “Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission,” is based on one of the oldest manga/anime IPs to make the trip from Japan to the West (and also one of the worst). Lastly, we’ve got “World War Z,” a zombie-schlock Shooter based on the movie “World War Z.” I have a sinking feeling that Chris is somehow going to force us to play this turd for Co-op Monday sometime next year…
The scourge of old things masquerading as new things is showing no signs of slowing down, with nearly half of April’s non-shovelware releases being ports and remasters. Unsurprisingly, ALL of them are aimed, like a cannon filled with rusty nails and chunks of old chain, at the 9th Gen wunderkind, the Switch. The Switch will be getting “new” ports of “Dragon’s Dogma,” “Wasteland 2,” “Shovel Knight,” “Neo Atlas 1469,” “Darksiders,” “Bomber Crew” (which it will be sharing with the PS4), and two ‘Final Fantasy’ games, “10/10-2” and “12” (which it will be sharing with the XBONE). Some of those are good games, yes, but if you don’t already have them on another platform, were you ever really interested in playing them in the first place?
There are several legitimate, new multi-platform releases coming in April… but not a single one of them is worth getting excited about. The only April multi-plat with name recognition is the 11th sequel in the long-in-the-tooth spectacle Fighting series, ‘Mortal Kombat.’ From there, it goes downhill fast with one (allegedly “X-Files”-inspired) Adventure game, “Truberbrook,” and one Visual Novel, “Our World is Ended.” Then there’s a vehicular mayhem game disguised as Racing, “Dangerous Driving.” And topping off the turd sundae, we’ve got a new Survivial game, “Fade to Silence,” and a new Roguelike, “Zanki Zero.” While it’s technically possible to pay me to touch any of those, the cost would be far more than a mere complimentary copy of the game.
All those ports and all the crappy multi-plats leave us with very little room for exclusives in April. There are a whopping three. Anyone want to guess which platforms are getting left out? (Hint: It’s VR and XBONE.) PC is getting a Sim sequel in “Anno 1800,” which is temporarily exclusive to the upstart moneyhat Epic Games Store. PlayStation is getting a Cinematic Zombie Sandbox (which guarantees that Chris will pre-order the most expensive edition to drool over), “Days Gone.” Finally, Nintendo is getting a new Rhythm IP, “Cytus Alpha,” which is apparently based on a phone game, but is a sequel, not a port. I guess? I don’t care enough about phone games to look it up.
PEEEEEEE-YEW! April’s burning dumpster of releases must also be filled with poop emojis made of actual poop, as the lineup absolutely REEKS! Time to take April out behind the barn with the shotgun and put her out of her misery…
Backlog Embiggened: +0
