Bound By Flame had potential, its excellent crafting system and skill trees are a good basis for any RPG, but the unbalanced combat system doesn't do a good job of exploiting them. The characters and story are hard to care for when most characters lack any emotion and expletives are used in every other sentence. If you are desperate for an RPG to play in your wait for The Witcher 3, then Bound By Flame could satisfy your needs for a short period of time. Bound By Flame doesn't bring anything new to the RPG genre, nor does it improve on any existing elements. A short play-time combined with an uninteresting story and unbalanced combat makes Bound By Flame tough to recommend, it frankly just isn't a good game.
It's obvious that Never Alone's Inupiat influences took precedence throughout the whole game, and as a result its gameplay took a hard knock. Some serious AI flaws and glitches ruined any enjoyment we could have with the game, as we spent more time wrestling with its problems than actually gaining any satisfaction. Never Alone is just not an enjoyable or fulfilling experience, and that is why it is best left alone.
It's clear to see that The Crew had potential, but the promises it made just simply aren't realised in the final product. While the thought of a digital America to drive across is certainly exciting, The Crew does a very bad job of executing on it and building an interesting environment to drive around in and discover. And when the bland world is combined with an easily forgettable storyline and the worst car handling we have ever experienced in a videogame, it's easy to understand why we did not have any fun with the game. The levelling up system and car customisation are the two good things among an otherwise hugely disappointing feature set. The Crew promised so much, but delivered so little.
Escape Trick: 35 Fateful Enigmas offers a decent puzzling experience, but its refusal to innovate or even introduce anything fresh into the game long past the halfway mark seriously dampens things. There is fun to be had here, but expect things to get repetitive and frustrating all too quickly.
Mad Carnage has a few things going for it in the form of its movement mechanics and the comic strip-led story sections, but they're packaged together with an experience that doesn't do them justice. Everything else is far too basic, and thus it fails at building a cohesive experience that we could recommend.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU tells a touching, personal story of family, grief, and loss, but it's wrapped up in a game that makes appreciating that narrative a lot harder than it should be. A Metroidvania in only the most basic of ways, its combat and platforming are spoilt by basic design and structure, as well as controller issues and frustrating one-hit kills. At its best when left to simply tell its story, Tales of Kenzera: ZAU falters once you have to start playing.
If only the rest of the game could reach those standards; it's a frustratingly average title that does nothing particularly well nor insultingly bad. The Chant is just very okay, which is probably the most boring route it could take.
Maybe you'll find something to like if you've never played a horror game like this before, but for anyone well-versed in the genre, the ground MADiSON covers is very well-worn.
For everything The Quarry does right, it has just as many glaring issues or niggling problems to bring it right back down to Earth. Supermassive Games has been trying to better Until Dawn for seven years now, and at this point, it looks like it's never, ever going to happen. The Quarry is just a bit dull, and that's the exact opposite of what these types of titles strive to be.
You could do a lot better than Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water this Halloween season; the PS5 has built up its horror library up just enough for there to be something else worthy of your time. Those cutscenes, though. Very creepy.
If everything Godfall had to offer was as good as its satisfying combat system, we would be looking at a darn good PS5 launch game. However, in reality, that's the only thing it has to boast about. An inconsequential loot system, recycled environments, and a frustrating mission structure thwart any sort of enjoyment the game might offer. It's not god-awful, but Godfall is going to be very quickly forgotten about.
Watch Dogs Legion might look and run better than ever on PS5, but that means little when the game itself struggles to break the boundaries of mediocrity. This next-gen version remains unchanged from its PS4 counterpart as far as gameplay goes, so the boosted performance does little to hide the title's underlying issues. No matter how well it runs, Watch Dogs Legion needs to sort out how it plays.
The younger generation is sure to extract some enjoyment out of Skully, but it proves all too basic for those getting on in their years.
Maid of Sker may be this developer's best attempt at horror yet, but it still falls short of something actually worth playing.
Despite the handful of enjoyable hours Rocket Arena has to offer, it's not an investment worth considering.
We fail to see how The Division 2: Warlords of New York is supposed to rejuvenate the looter shooter's playerbase. New York might be so much more interesting to explore while the missions themselves are smartly designed, but what you're actually doing there remains very much the same. Coupled with a copious amount of bugs and glitches, this is an expansion the vast majority of players can very safely skip.
Dawn of Fear is not what you would typically consider a good video game and it most definitely does not perform like one. However, when it works, there hasn't been anything else quite like it for the best part of two decades. Dawn of Fear is the best and worst tribute to Resident Evil at the same time, and we can't think anything more intriguing than that.
Despite feeling out of date in one too many key areas, Terminator: Resistance manages to serve up a campaign just about worthy enough for those looking to switch their brain off and enjoy some mindless action. Its efforts to heighten the importance of relationships and interactions go a long way to differentiating the experience but held back by technical deficiencies, the vision isn't quite fully realised.
Metro Exodus: The Two Colonels is adequate in every sense of the word - it doesn't do anything impressively well nor insultingly bad. It's just okay, and while that might be enough to convince fans of the series to take a short trip underground, it's something that anyone else can safely skip.
The Church in the Darkness has some good ideas, but they're not properly realised. Gameplay never ventures out of its basic boundaries, while the narrative doesn't offer up enough variety or compelling subplots to engage with. The Church in the Darkness is competent for a couple of playthroughs, but it's an experience that you'll quickly forget about.