Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: 007 First Light · 4 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…
Throughout, I was conscious that I was playing something that was almost aggressively designed to be disposable, and for that reason I can't say it feels close to my heart – but at the same time, I might just keep it hanging around my hard drive to fill idle half-hours now and again.
These enhancements are great, sometimes even game-changing, but Paradox are offering so much for free that it makes the actual premium DLC less vital.
Bulletstorm is lots of silly fun, and deserved to do better in 2011. It's still lots of silly fun, but it's hard to quite get as behind the desire for it to do well when it's being released at full price with very little new put in.
I heartily encourage you to grab this if you've got a kid trying to learn it at school. Heck, if you're a physics teacher you really should buy a bunch of copies, as this'll be a surefire way to gain the attention of some of your students. Or if you just fancy reminding yourself about logic gates, pulse generators and capacitors, this is a neat little thing.
This could, as I say, have been all comic pratfalls and Goat Simulator destruction, but instead it's an extremely careful study in how snakes navigate their bizarre bodies around, then transplanted into broadly well-done puzzle-places. I feel in awe of how well-realised this is, almost more than I actually enjoy it. I really do enjoy it though, so much so that I ended up picking it up for my Switch too (making it only the second game I own for Nintendo's latest toy).
At the beginning of the game, I'd hoped to solve a mystery and have a few laughs, but now I miss the company of this little crew. It's a smart game though and a thoughtful one, even if it sometimes hides those qualities behind its clown makeup and a beaglepuss.
I've played it for so damned long, and have just run out of patience with it, and absolutely do not care any more about the arc story. It's taken so long to go anywhere, crawling along every few days of play, and just isn't compelling at all.
There was a big part of me that didn't want to stop playing and maybe I'll pick it up again some day, because there is so much to love about discovering the laws of nature behind this huge, ruined ecosystem. But with each random death, each accidental roll off a cliffside, each checkpoint drought, that love turned to ash. There is so much beauty and intrigue and diversity of life in Rain World. It's a pity the game doesn't want you to see any of it.
I'm not sure how to sum this up for a review, truth be told. I have notes written from early on when I was brimming over with excitement and wonder and I'm pulling them together having lost that sense of connection with the game in its later stages. I think I would have felt differently if I'd played as a non-reviewer and walked away when I felt that interest wane instead of ploughing onward.
It's tremendous at creating its distinct atmosphere and then drawing you deeper in. It's witty, spooky, and achieves an ideal sense of urgency. Weird, clamant and intriguing, this is well worth a look.
As a follow-up to the previous trilogy, it's a timid and tepid tale too heavily reliant on what came before, too unambitious for what could have been, trapped in a gargantuan playground of bits and pieces to do.
It's rare to see such ambitious storytelling and open world roleplaying tied to such a stylish combat system, not to mention the (optional) Souls-like multiplayer elements, shooter tangents, mini-games that punctuate rather than interrupting, and that big ol' world to explore. You don't need to have played any of Yoko Taro's previous games to appreciate Automata, even though it has links to both Drakengard and (of course) the original Nier, but it'll probably make you keen to seek them out. Me? I'm hoping Platinum get a chance to work with these worlds and words again.
Cosmic Express is just as delightful to look at, and has a really solid core of puzzling to get your brain around!
Pixel Privateers knows exactly what it's doing, and though it's about as deep as a microwave lasagne, it's almost impossible not to lose yourself to it for a few evenings.
It's a game of risk, reward and really bad decisions. It's many times more thoughtful than Duelyst, which is always my yardstick for card games. But at the same time it is much less climactic, less explosive, and less creative with its minions and their abilities.