Brodie Gibbons
- Hotline Miami
- BioShock
- Guitar Hero
Brodie Gibbons's Reviews
While I enjoyed a fraction of my time exploring Martha is Dead's gorgeous Tuscan farmlands, the thing I'm most thankful for is how mercifully short the game is. The closing credits shocked me back into coherence like a bolt out of the blue to cap off what is-and I'm being generous-an interestingly imperfect experience.
I consider myself a pretty big fan of those Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It was everything to me when I was a kid and it does sadden my inner child to have played this game. It'll appeal to some that are new to the franchise who may want to tune out and just wallop on endless, nameless clay men for a few hours but, as a long-time fan, I found only disappointment with rare sprinklings of flair.
AFL 23 is inconsistent in its attempts to emulate the most complicated sport on the planet. It jags six points by delivering arguably the best gameplay we've had, but doesn't make the distance in serving up a complete, robust package.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 has to be partially excused for some of its shortcomings, given CI's inexperience at producing larger scale, bigger budget games. It does have a pleasing core experience that is sadly let down by, more or less, every other facet of the game. Come for the poor load times, the dreadful writing and the painted-on, wooden expressions the game's cast has, but stay for the sniping. Because the sniping is great.
After being revealed to a reasonable amount of fanfare, it's fair to say that We Happy Few is one of the year's biggest disappointments. Though there's a lot of the BioShock fingerprint evident here, this lineage isn't ever lived up to. The story, characters and the character of the world itself are positively to die for and exist as the game's few triumphs. It's a beautiful disaster of a game and was perhaps too ambitious for a developer so green as bugs, frustrating A.I. and a slipshod procedural generation robs We Happy Few of any chance it had to be great.
Card Shark succeeds at establishing wild stakes within its wonderfully weird take on 18th century France. It serves up a memorable cast, a story that rewrites history in a fantastical way, all the while arming the player with tricks of the trade that'd make Penn and Teller blush. For a game that's more about playing your opponent than your cards, Card Shark is a memorable adventure.
Serious Sam is a series that has long alluded me and I'm starting to think it might have been for the better. Although this fourth iteration might feature some staggering, titanic battles and silk-smooth gunplay, its existence feels like a clear reminder that it's often best to let the past stay dead. Serious Sam 4 is an excavation from a long-outdated era that is more Duke Nukem Forever than it is Doom.
Harold Halibut's narrative, setting and visuals are so wonderful and creative from a sci-fi perspective, it's an enormous shame it's housed within such a one-note and heartbreakingly boring video game.
Bright Memory Infinite is a disappointing follow-up to a prelude that made its share of promises. It's a shame because a polished expansion on the original concept would have had a certain cult appeal, whereas Infinite feels watered down. It's a pretty game, and best of all it's free for those who lashed out for the prelude, but in the end, it plays like a game that got spooked by its own shadow and is a result of improbable ambition.
It’s disappointing that, through shortcomings in design and the platform’s limitations, Iron Man VR isn’t a superhero outing worthy of the story told here, nor the Tony Stark that has carried Marvel’s films into this new age of popcorn cinema.
I wish I could say that Sea of Solitude excels in every way a game can. Though it offers an honest, raw depiction of how unfortunately disparate life can be and the toil that goes with that, it fires few shots as an interactive experience. A rather barren world and repetitive core loops only serve to mar what is an otherwise overwhelming sensory treat.
Just Cause is undoubtedly a fun series with a devoted following. When you embrace the chaos there can be a lot of fun to be had, but it's when you look deeper at the nuts and bolts it isn't a bustling sandbox you find. It's more of a litter tray, full of waste. If you expect the finest the genre has to offer you're bound for disappointment, though if you're after more of bedlam Just Cause is famous for then this fourth iteration is what the doctor ordered.
Despite its satisfying core loops and drip-feeding of loot slathered in mechanical jargon, it's hard to recommend The Crew 2 based on what many would consider to be its selling points. The world is barren despite being billed as a greatest hits of American landmarks and 'car feel' itself is frustratingly basic and holds your hand far too much. The interconnectivity did its best to compel me to stick with it but The Crew 2 is a sad case of wasted potential.
FIFA it ain't, but it wasn't ever going to be. AFL Evolution is a game that, given its niche market, we're pretty fortunate to have. Wicked Witch have yet to craft the perfect footy game, but there's certainly fun to be had here.
Ghostrunner II, for half of a game, manages to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made the first a high-octane thrill ride. The other half is a dull, albeit thematically rich, journey to an outside world that is, in theory, worthy of the runtime but fails in practice for the kind of game Ghostrunner is.
Stray Gods might be a well-written, narrative-driven murder mystery that drags us to Olympus and back again, but it fails to deliver anything remotely close to an earworm after hours of forgettable melodies. Though Bailey and Baker do enough to earn their flowers, the production itself does little to land Stray Gods a place among the musical pantheon.
Through its picturesque presentation, Ravenlok definitely captures the reverie and spirit we'd expect from a coming-of-age fantasy. Sadly, the game's one-note combat doesn't offer a challenge worthy of its world, while the cliched story devalues its charming cast of misfit critters.
Redfall is a gold dust-rare miss for what has been a very consistent deliverer of quality video games. If you are able to look beyond the game's several questionable design choices, Redfall can serve up just a small bite of mindless fun beneath the island's black hole sun.
Mike Bithell's writing, as it often is, remains on point as his team establishes new colours within an already riveting sci-fi world, not by replicating what came before-as appropriate as that may have been thematically-but by taking the franchise in a bold direction. It's a shame this thrilling plot against the archives is derezzed, and perhaps doomed to obsoletion, by a string of confoundingly dull puzzles.
The story plays out like a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced popcorn atrocity, the upgrade shop might as well be Travelex given how many currencies it juggles, and the performance is less than optimal. Atomic Heart is an exercise in excess. It has some clear strengths, like its first in class art direction and gunplay, however these are far outweighed by the game's faults.