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…
Detroit is a perfect game to livestream, or play with three mates and half a bottle of tequila – but if you tell me you genuinely think the story is well done, I will immediately be sus that you, yourself, are an android poorly trying to replicate human behaviour.
Frog Detective 2 is a game you can hold in your head all at once, and cherish. I think it’s great.
I do wish Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory had been a bit more daring in the attempt.
If you’ve been waiting for a full-on simulation with all the bells and textbooks, and nothing less will satisfy you, Mechwarrior 5 isn’t going to cut it. For everyone else though, it’s bloody excellent.
I had a genuinely good time with it for at least 75% of the time I spent playing it. If you’re actually into the series as a whole, I imagine you’ll have an even better one.
There’s slow-burn greatness in Phoenix Point. It’s a game where you might be exploring a site, bracing for ambush, but instead find an abandoned theme park dedicated to a novelty boy band of hedge fund managers called the Lucrative Lads.
For better and for worse, Shenmue III is a perfect continuation.
If you can look past its obvious pacing issues – and some of its more gratuitous character designs – Atelier Ryza is a solid slice of JRPG comfort food that goes down easy and might just leave you asking for more. If you’re part of that in-group – and you likely know if you are – you’re in for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Bum-bo may have to deal with a lot of crap, but it’s all well worth pushing through.
Its saving virtue is that it is a right biggo, a thoughtless blast of blockbuster ‘splosions, a popcorn game, the grand kahuna you can point to when some bore starts burping on about how single player is dead
In all the time I played, nothing really of any interest poked its head up from behind cover.
Overall, despite all the frustrations, I enjoyed being a broody detective cat. I just wish the game itself was as strong as the story it was trying to tell.
I’ve not been a professional games reviewer for that long, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was frightened by the prospect of offering my opinion, publically, on a work of this size and importance. Truly, this is a Monday to hate more than any other.
It’s an accomplishment, and it’s certainly better and more original than the vast bulk of games in the physics-gimmick subgenre, but I respect it a lot more than I like it.
Given the scarcity of successors, then, I see no reason why Microsoft shouldn’t just keep making this game bigger and bigger and bigger, lumping all the bits together every few years and slapping it down with nicer animations, until it’s got ten thousand missions and includes “Dudley” as a civilisation because they ran out of ideas. That would be fine by me. Long live the (Age of) King(s)