Don’t be fooled by screenshots to this effect. Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.
Singleplayer felt so mechanical, so repetitive – whereas with humans and no unlocks to pursue in multiplayer, it felt tense and organic.
You’ll have a good time with Dead Rising 4. But you won’t feel as though you earned it.
This has an intensity that vanilla Skylines does not have, this race against time element, this coping with cataclysm factor. You don’t have to play Scenarios – you can just have disasters as a randomly-occuring risk in a standard game. But the Scenarios do provide a backbone to something that sometimes seems a bit stuck on the fence between ‘game’ and design tool.
American Truck Simulator is my game of the year. Again. If we get more states in 2017, it almost certainly will be my game of the year then, too.
Really, what this is is The Martian compressed into a fraction of its length, with minor interactivity in a few key scenes. It feels like it should be a promotional freebie for the movie, not a $20, 40-minute game that actually costs more than the bloody Blu-Ray does.
It is a pretty decent VR title though, with a strong conceit and pleasant scenery. That makes it notable enough. To be honest, what it really needs is support for sticking your arms out at your side and flapping around like Big Bird, but perhaps the later Vive version and/or Oculus Touch support might let us live out our Michael Keaton mid-life crisis fantasies.
This is an excellent Hitman game, and a substantial one. As an all-in-one package it perhaps doesn’t feel as vast as it did when released in chunks, but it still works well. The experiment to make each level bigger, more distinctive and more ornate instead of having a glut of them has worked extremely well.
I like the game at CE’s heart, but interacting with it is simply unpleasant. Were it slick and reliable perhaps I could bear its extreme micro-management and unhelpful UI, but the fact is that it’s currently strewn with technical errors, most of which boil down to, once again, build orders not happening. Meteor storms, cult outbreaks and merman invasions are its highlight, yes, but ultimately they are just colourful interruptions to a deeply frustrating normality.
With Civ 6, I really do feel like I’m playing Civ right out of the gates – it’s remarkable how much it reminds me of the first ever game in the series. There’s a certain balance and pull of development vs competition that’s really present and correct, and now it’s accompanied by this delightful, colourful, busy appearance it feels surprisingly fresh, once one can get past its failure to explain stuff like Amenities.
Happy 20th birthday, Lara. I hope you find your way home one day.
THUMPER is the videogame you should play today.
If Slayer Shock is to have a long afterlife, it will come not from binging, but from slow, careful forays into its Hellmouth.
You very rarely get to relax in Colorado. Someone’s always thinking about feeling your collar, and unlike some of the other maps, there’s almost nowhere to run away to if you get found out. The bastards are everywhere. It’s tenser and even more difficult than its predecessors as a result. This is much more of a pure stealth map.
Straightforward, simple, but slick and solid. Cossacks is comfort food, but it feels sufficiently of today despite its cheerfully throwback heart. I had a good time, and most of all I realised that I’m more than ready for this once so staid of genres to come back in earnest.
