Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: 007 First Light · 5 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…
Hearts of Stone reminded me exactly what I loved about it the first time around, and all I could think when the credits rolled was how much I look forward to firing this game up in a few more months and concluding both Geralt's final adventure, and one of the PC's finest RPGs. Give or take a few giant bloody spiders. Grr.
It still comes up short on character compared to the best Civs and, of course, Alpha Centauri, but it's without doubt less anodyne than before. Diplomacy, however, seems to me like a significant misfire even without the bugs – the question of your place in this new world, and in relation to your rivals, remains unresolved. I suspect Beyond Earth's road to recovery has only just begun.
So there Sublevel Zero lies, this peculiar mix of instantly entertaining and disappointingly hollow. Tidying up the crafting, and making it meaningful, would add a lot. And gosh, it desperately needs a rethink about those unexplained, unpredictable dead-ends. But heck, I want to keep on playing anyway. I feel like so much more could be added to it, and I rather hope to see that happen. As it is, I'm suspicious it won't hold people's attention long enough for the £11 entry fee.
As well as being the most unabashed Transformers fan-service games have given us yet, it's also a slick, exciting, hyper-fast punchy-shooty game in its own right. It's dumb as a box of Dinobots of course, but it's not even trying to be otherwise – and that's why its simple, colourful enthusiasm for robot-bashing is so infectious.
[T]hose who haven't got it by now may be quite happy to continue ignoring it. I think this would be an enormous shame. If this is you, I want to tell you that it is a game worth playing.
There's a chance the bugs could be patched out, although this really is in a sort of Arkham Knight place where pulling it and finishing it is the better option. But even if it ran without constantly breaking, it would still be a really dreadful adventure game. A gorgeous one – some of the most lovely animation I've ever seen in a game – but just so poor.
So did I enjoy it? Kind of. I think I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, and then that appreciation was tinged with a wish that it could have been more. More clever, more surprising, more deep. But more importantly, it made me think, made me worry about people I care about, made me uncomfortable. And for that, I think, it deserves praise.
Life Is Strange is still a strong candidate for my game of the year but this episode raised a bunch of problems.
After Dark is, I think, the best possible outcome for Skylines: successfully sticking its hand out for more cash but doing nothing to puncture goodwill in the process. Cue more swearing at EA HQ, perhaps.
The brilliance of Undertale, its delicate balance that it manages for most of the time you'll spend playing it, is that it understands how to be scary and funny all at once. Inside the Snowdin library there are leather-bound books that contain strange prophecies, books that say profound and disconcerting things about the human soul.
I wish there were more, particularly relating to team management and the persistency of the world, but this will do. It's not as clean and clever as fellow fictional ball-handler Frozen Cortex, but the messiness and violence really do add something. There's nothing quite like recognising that you're not going to score in the last turn of a half and concentrating all of your efforts toward obliterating the opponent team instead. Especially when they're High Elves.
While it is an enormously satisfying and well-crafted game, SOMA never managed to convince me that its themes and plot were in tune with its more traditional first-person frights. It scared me and it gave me cause to think about some of the issues raised, but now that I'm done, I doubt it'll stay long in my mind, or plucking at my nerves.
It's entirely possible that you'll respond much more kindly to Dropsy than I have. I wish it had been easier, with a second layer of clues accessible beneath the basic pictograph conversations perhaps. I also wish I'd felt more of a connection with Dropsy himself and I have no doubt that some people will.
What you have here is a decent, if flawed game. And it's been released into a market with some really stunning games in the same genre. If you've bought it, and are playing it, the chances are you're having fun and not regretting the purchase. You would, of course, tick Yes when asked if you like it. So would I.
Such player-driven drama, comedy, and action eclipses anything in the disappointing scripted narrative. The Phantom Pain is one of the worst Metal Gear stories ever told. It functions neither as a standalone narrative nor as worthwhile insight into the series overall. And yet, The Phantom Pain is the best stealth-action game ever made, one where playing flawlessly is just as thrilling as outright failure. And boy – what a thrill.