The PC adaptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! gamebooks has some rough edges, but it's a thrilling, sprawling adventure overall. [OpenCritic note: This review was for both parts 3 and 4.]
The PC adaptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! gamebooks has some rough edges, but it's a thrilling, sprawling adventure overall.
ReCore features adorable robot companions and snappy platforming, but a chore of an end-game, bugs, and terrible load times make it a hard sell.
I don’t want to disparage The Turing Test too much. It suffers by nature of comparisons with other similar games, but perhaps unfairly. With its lightweight puzzles and plot, The Turing Test is one of those “Great-For-An-Afternoon” games, the ones that scratch a specific itch and go down easy. In this case, it’s the “I need something like Portal, but I’ve already played Portal” itch.
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is an excellent adaptation. Like Sorcery, it never really transcends the cheesy sword-and-board adventure-fantasy of the original adventure gamebook it sources from, but that’s not really the point is it? Hell, the archetypal characters and straightforward questing are part of the charm. Tin Man’s lovingly reshaped Steve Jackson’s work into a relaxing and lightweight RPG, perfect to run once or twice in a night and hope this time you avoid all Zagor’s traps and make it to the end.
I miss it, now that it’s over. I’ve waited a long, long time for another Myst game. There have been some substitutes, some pinch hitters that tried to emulate that style. But there’s something special to me about an honest-to-goodness Cyan game. Me, personally—meaning I’m not strictly sure whether there’s a real-life difference or if my opinions are colored by nostalgia. It doesn’t matter, really, except insofar as I felt like I should write that lengthy disclosure up top. I like Cyan’s work.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided feels exactly like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for better and worse.
For now? It’s a good start. I’m not hooked like the first season of The Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us, but it’s looking like more of a slow burn with a lot of potential. Telltale sets up a lot of plot threads in this first episode, and it’s actually pretty impressive how many bit players they’ve introduced in just an hour and a half.
Headlander's retrofuturist aesthetic is creative enough to make up for the fact its underlying mechanics are anything but.
Song of the Deep is gorgeous and has some creative ideas, but lacks the polish to make it a must-play.
The Technomancer’s not even actively terrible. It’s just completely forgettable. Come for the Brutalist architecture, stay because you’ve got nothing better to do with seventeen hours of your life. And that’s a low bar, here.
Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter is a hard left over Reichenbach Falls. It's Frogwares taking all the wrong lessons from Crimes and Punishments, turning out its least-coherent Sherlock games in ages and filling it with all sorts of mechanical drudgery. Such a shame.
What’s the saying? “Old witchers never die, they just fade away.” Something like that. One thing’s for certain: The Witcher 3 is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, and Blood and Wine is a fitting capstone not only on it but on the whole series. I’ll miss it.
Total Warhammer doesn't tamper with much, but it injects enough personality to revive a series that's been steadily collapsing under its own weight.
Homefront: The Revolution ends up a more fitting sequel than I think anyone could've predicted. Like its predecessor, this is a kludged-together mish-mash of trendy design ideas from other, better games, glued to a story that punches far above its weight and aspires to something much greater.
It may not be as influential or creative as either the original Doom or Doom 3—which, although it hasn't aged well, ushered in a dozen monster-closet copycats. Still, Doom in 2016 is successful because it knows it's dumb and leans into the fact. There are no pretensions towards artistry here, no delusions of grandeur. It's a popcorn flick where the main character can only speak in gunshots.
Stellaris is great. Maybe not Crusader Kings II great yet—give it a few expansions to fill out—but it's a compelling bit of player-directed science fiction. Freed from the chains of history Paradox has created something creative and bold and inspiring, something that illuminates just how vast and unknowable space is and how tiny our place in it.
Same great art, same tense tactical battles, same bewildering sense of scope emanating from such delicate pieces. I never knew slow pans across landscape paintings could instill such awe, and yet certain sequences in The Banner Saga 2 support tension that belies the game's humble budget.
Day of the Tentacle is a classic, but not in the old musty way where you brush off a copy of some old SNES game and realize it isn’t as good as you remember. This is still one of the finest point-and-clicks ever made, with a witty story and some brain-bending puzzles. Also, a hell of a lot of dumb puns.
This is the most frustrated I've been with a shoddy port in years. There have been other high-profile trainwrecks in the recent past, like Batman: Arkham Knight and Assassin's Creed: Unity. But I didn't like those games, aside from their obvious PC woes.