Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: Denshattack! · 6 days ago
I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I…
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and…
Ultimately, it’s competent, but without the systems or story being on the same level as the aesthetic Seasons After Fall will soon fade from memory.
It’s definitely bloated, needing a brutal hand to strip out a few dozen of the weaker puzzles. Because in there are challenges that are not only good, but sometimes great. Really satisfying to solve. It’s that they’re too frequently diluted down by a series of chambers far more entertaining for the brief banter between TOM and Ava at the start than the process of completion. As such, it falls a good distance short of the two mighty games it emulates.
If you're the kind of person who wishes it still was the eighties and likes the idea of revisiting a button-mashing romp, warts and all, you'll find a lot to like about this one. But even so, you might find it wearing thin after a while. After all, even the Age of Nostalgia must come to an end.
Firetop Mountain itself becomes a little 3D board, rather than the hulking, ominous sprawl of fond imagining.
The fact that Squeenix are continuing to grant us the role of a surrogate James Bond in playgrounds as varied and swish as a luxury Thai hotel, is good enough for me.
People are going to like it, because it achieves what it sets out to do and because it can yet be mined for greater efficiency of construction and weirder or more specialist designs, but right now I’m not expecting the break-out mega-success of a Factorio or Rimworld. It just doesn’t have the flex. Not yet, anyway, but the slick, compulsive, ever so slightly bland Project Highrise is certainly a strong foundation for the community to take it somewhere weirder and wilder.
This is a fantastic game for generating anecdotes, as I found when I first played it way back when, but it’s also an enjoyable challenge.
It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.
There is something here for fans of the genre (if it is a genre). The world is big and each faction has a hefty handful of quests that you’ll need to work to deserve. There’s also instant co-op, which means tougher missions, like taking out a well-guarded fort, can be approached with mates. Likewise, the broad strokes of fantasy – the undead, magic artifacts, sea monsters – might be enough to intrigue you deeper into this world of pirates and tradesmen.
While Worms W.M.D. might evoke the halcyon days of Armageddon, it’s more than capable of standing on its own as another high point for the series.
The Final Station is a simple game, which is always just compelling enough for its duration. I’ve come to think of it as an efficient, low budget horror movie: it has a high concept it can’t afford to show directly and so it wrings as much as it can from the mystery and the satisfaction of piecing the plot together from snippets. It’s only a shame that its action suffers more from never having a particularly interesting concept of its own.
I cautiously recommend checking Valley out regardless, because, dreary exposition, excessive darkness and a cruel and unusual checkpointing system aside, it does what it does with polish and expertise.
Okhlos feels like an elevator pitch – ‘go smash up a comedy ancient Greece’ – made flesh, without too much worry about expanding upon the concept. I do admire that, there’s a purity and a glee to it, and it’s refreshing to not butt up against a skill ceiling as in something like Isaac, but I guess once you’ve smote one god, you’ve smote ’em all.
It’s a perfect game for playing with kids (although try to keep your sniggering at the cactus willies to a minimum, in order to avoid awkward conversations). What we don’t have is Ubisoft Reflections reaching for something new, something innovative, something surprising.
Mankind Divided is a new version of one of my favourite games of all time and free from the execution problems that hampered that last iteration. The levels are bigger and prettier. There are no dumb boss fights. It gives you slightly more agency over its story. The new abilities are nice, even if they don't dramatically alter the flow of the game.