Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark (2025)

I can confidently say Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is consistently amazing. The utterly lovable two protagonists complement each other with their polarized personalities. The clever yet sometimes perverted humor never fails to make me smile or laugh. The perfect and responsive 2D-pixel platforming gameplay and great co-op implementation make this cleaning a job a hard one not to recommend.

This Gal Guardians sequel hits all the right notes for a fun if cumbersome search action experience: lovely animation and aesthetics, great action and boss fights, and a nice map to uncover. However it does suffer a bit for some repeated boss moments (like the scarabs in Yohane the Parhelion), some not-so-intuitive backtracking options, and the fact that you have to grind for bones to get the top-shelf navigation powerups. Still, it's far from being abysmal and is at least worth your time if you fancy an anime-infused search action game featuring characters from Inti Creates' Gal Gun universe. And some jiggle and fanservice to go along with it. For chrissakes, there's an achievement for getting bathed in a big-boobied dragon girl's oil saliva; that pretty much gives you an idea of the title's demographic.

Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark boasts a large world to explore and plenty of fun combat options, but it does have a few minor design decisions that make me scratch my head.

With Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark, there’s a solid solo and fun cooperative campaign that offers a good 15 plus hours of action, depending on how often you get lost. Level design has improved since the last game, humour is on-brand with Gal Guardians’ preceding series of games, and movement feels great. Here’s another Metroidvania I can recommend to the newbie and veteran alike. ∎