When I finished playing this game, I felt like I wanted more. That's the mark of a good game. I also felt like I had played something fresh. If there were 20 games about Rome, this one might not stand out as the most outstanding. But it's good, and there aren't enough tales with a historical background that wind up being big budget video games. I'm glad that Crytek stayed the course on its seven-year journey and finally finished Ryse.
Sid Meier should be proud to have his name on Civilization: Beyond Earth. It's got its problems. But it's a game that will have you staying up late at night, itching to complete just one more turn.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is worth your time. It delivers with its story, great acting, dialogue, the realistic facial animations, cool weapons of the future, and the welcome change in pacing from combat missions to stealth missions. I welcome the idea of using great actors like Spacey in a big-budget game, and I look forward to future versions of the game that marry Hollywood blockbuster actors with the blockbuster-style game play.
As with Rome II, the positives outweigh the annoyances. Creative Assembly has been very ambitious with Total War: Attila, and the game is a lot more compelling than its predecessor. It feels more balanced. The A.I. is smarter, but a human general can still beat it. But the unrelenting weight of a collapsing empire pushes a human ruler to the limit. If you simply survive for a while, you'll feel like you've won the game.
This is the 10th Battlefield game, and at this stage in the franchise's history, it isn't easy to come up with fresh takes. Visceral Games has done that.
The game really lives up to its promise and vision, and that's a rarity in an age of hype.
That's the kind of story about Master Chief that I like. He knows what the odds are, and he keeps attacking anyway, taking the fight to enemy. Instead, we get a story about betrayal and an ultimate showdown. But that showdown isn't that satisfying, and it's not even what Microsoft promised in some of its earlier commercials. I was disappointed because I expected something really significant to happen in the ending, and all I got was a cliffhanger.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a big step forward on multiplayer play, the quality of the single-player story, the imaginative story paths, and the outstanding quality of the wide-open landscapes, and the wide variety of enemies. I suspect that Activision has a very good chance of restoring the series to record levels in comparison to the last couple of years.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is an epic adventure, and it's a story well told and well played.
Guns Up! will look familiar to a lot of players through its similarities to Clash of Clans. But, it has enough going for it to be unique and enjoyable. It is vastly more interactive than a lot of asynchronous multiplayer offerings that have proliferated on mobile, and it successfully brings some of the accessibility and simplicity of mobile games to the PS4 console.
Quantum Break is a memorable game. It makes me truly wonder if any of us can truly escape the reach of time, and it reminds me we all have to live with the choices we make.
The ending makes it feel like this story just isn't finished, that it's simply a midway marker to a larger, more weighty tale with a full and satisfying ending. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes us only part way there, and we still want to get to those enemies in the shadows.
Gears of War 4 is a very well-executed, bug-free game with awesome technical effects. The single-player campaign is on the short side at nine hours, but it gives you everything that you want and expect in a Gears of War game. The Coalition does a decent job walking the tightrope of providing something that fans want and giving them something different at the same time. The Horde mode has taken the co-op play in a very good direction, and I expect that fans are going to enjoy multiplayer quite a bit as well.
I felt like I was playing Grand Theft Auto III. If I were rating the story and acting, I would put it at a 95 out of 100. But with all of the bugs and flaws in the gameplay, I am rating the entire package at 75 out of 100. I hope my feedback will be useful as a reminder to developers that six months more work on a game can pay off with huge dividends in quality. But I also believe some of the problems here would be very hard to fix with simple updates.
Overall, I thought it did a wonderful job delivering something fresh. And that’s very hard to do in the shooter genre. The single-player game should be longer, but that’s not such a bad complaint. The developers made something that I couldn’t get enough of, and that’s a good thing.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare delivers a familiar Call of Duty gameplay in an innovative new setting that should satisfy gamers who are tired of playing the same old thing.
The ending of the game will leave you wondering just what was real and what was an illusion. I thoroughly enjoyed the dramatic arc of each major scene. It starts out calm, moves to disturbing, and then descends into chaos and madness. I think the storytellers and designers exercised tight creative control, with a game that is understated as well as explosive.
Chloe and Nadine are a good salve for the loss I still feel about the ending of Drake's story.
Overall, Total War: Warhammer II is an exciting edition to the Total War series, and the Warhammer characters certainly add a lot of personality. They're the sort of characters who generate more interest in the narrative and make you more interested in pursuing the rest of the story.
My hat's off to the developers at Sledgehammer who are helping a new generation understand the sacrifices of those who died in the Second World War.