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…
It's a likeable game, and it feels fantastic to play when you nail an extended combat encounter with a chain of flawless shots, deflections, rolls, slides and aerial skull punches. It can be a touch imprecise, especially when trying to time a shot while rolling or throwing an explosive, but sometimes your failures can be just as entertaining as an unbroken display of acrobatic death.
There's loads to do in Lego Marvel Avengers, but only when you've found it. And of course the animation is well done, the ridiculous amount to collect relatively compelling, and if your kid 100%ed Marvel Super Heroes, then this will likely give them a new fix. But it's a despondent entry in a series that perhaps TT are finally beginning to grow tired of making.
You'll cry. And cry and cry and cry. But I think you'll love it.
In fact, if you've looked at the screenshots, read this, and thought, "Goodness me, John's an idiot," then this is the game for you! I can't tell you where it goes in the later puzzles (there are 60 in total), as they unlock one at a time.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a prequel to the legendary Homeworld space real-time strategy games, but this time - heresy! - set on land. Here's our review.
There are so many smart ideas in here, and the concept is neat, even if obviously derivative. But the execution doesn't hold it together, with disappointing responses to extremes, and a strangely anticlimactic progression. I feel like if this were given another six months, the game could be as interesting to play as it is in ambition. But as it is, it's not there.
Oxenfree was an unexpected delight for me. Atmospheric, beautiful and with the ability to feel real connections between its characters.
The thin storyline around it is entirely superfluous, I'll admit to tiring of the spaceship looking identical every single time I play and it's fair to say there's less motivation to keep on going back once you finally beat it, but even if you only get a few days out of it, right now the price is right.
It'll keep you busy for a long damn time too, even if you only play it once – though, of course, for many there'll be later playthroughs in co-op or at at unlockable higher difficulties. I think it's the (admittedly presumed) desire to be the spiritual sequel to Diablo II which holds me back from heaping breathless praise on Grim Dawn, though.
That Dragon, Cancer is an important game because it tries, but not because it succeeds.
[T]rust me, pick this one up.
What's such a shame about the puzzles, beyond those which are simply bad (not very many, but gosh, they're bad), is that what it doesn't do is let you move around the world. And that's even more strange when the transitions between puzzles are the camera swooping down streets and through doors between one and the next, so there was definitely a world built in which one could have moved about.
It feels like a game which knows exactly what it wants to be. And like a game which someone really, really wanted to make.
It's a step forward for the series and a step toward Total War: Medieval III. I hope the improvements here will inform that game, should it be on the drawing board. These gloriously attractive strategic sandboxes may be about the journey rather than the destination, but without a clear destination in sight, and without a shared objective to tie their factions together, they can become unwieldy. As a template for Total Warhammer, Charlemagne seems like a snug fit.
When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.