It feels borderline useless to try and write a review of a game like The Division because it's packaged under this games-as-a-service banner, expected to bandage its problems and evolve into something wholly different in six months/a year/two years.
New journey, old friends. I don’t know what possessed Beamdog to make Siege of Dragonspear an expansion to the original game, nor do I know what devil’s pact coerced them into making it thirty-odd hours long. It’s insanity.
IO's built the bones of a fantastic Hitman game—certainly the best since Blood Money (though that bar is practically nonexistent) and possibly one of the best in the whole series. Skip it for now if you're just looking to one-and-done each level, but if you were hoping for a sandbox experience? You've got one.
Either you never thought Need for Speed was top of the arcade racing pack or (like me) you at least think they abdicated the crown a long while back. I don't anticipate much dispute there, and this Need for Speed is unlikely to put them back on top. A lot of love's been put into this PC port, but the game that's been ported over is a mediocre arcade racer at best.
Shardlight is pretty damned decent though. The story’s a bit more straightforward than some other Wadjet Eye games, it ends a bit too abruptly, and a few of the secondary characters needed fleshing out, but all-in-all it makes for an engaging six or seven hours in a world with some great ideas—a bit like Dead Synchronicity, except with an ending. Very grim. Very adult.
Yearly releases are hurting good games. I don't know what the sales data looks like, so I can't speak to that claim from a financial perspective. I'm sure the backroom at Ubisoft has done the calculations and concluded that the number of consumers lost per year is offset by the amount of money made.
Is there enough here? I think so. Superhot is a gimmick game, and it was always going to be a gimmick game. I never expected otherwise. But as far as one-trick ponies go this one is pretty stellar, doing its damnedest to make you feel like the consummate badass and leaving you with all sorts of "That was amazing" moments, feats that could never be pulled off at full-speed. Or, at least, not on purpose. And at two hours it gets in, hits hard, and then knows when to get back out again. A rarity, in games.
Two weeks ago I went to a doctor and they told me it might be cancer. Not a thing anyone wants to hear. I came home, told my editor I'd probably take a few days off work, and then launched Unravel. Why? Because I wanted to think about literally nothing at all.
Suspense is an important tool, in horror. Suspense is what makes scares work. Five, ten, fifteen minutes of excruciating emptiness makes the eventual jump scare effective because we're lulled into complacency. The pacing in Layers of Fear is numbing, with "scares" coming at you so often they quickly lose their potency.
[SPOILER WARNING] The White March has its issues—pacing problems in the first half, an over-reliance on huge groups of enemies in the second, and three companions who aren't given enough time to breathe before their quests are over—but it's a solid expansion with some incredible moments sprinkled throughout.
The fetch quests need to go. Or they need to be dressed up better. Either way. I thought Dying Light was over-reliant on them in its first incarnation, and that was in a pre-Witcher 3 world. Playing The Following, I often found myself pulling open the map, looking at how far I needed to go to reach any objectives, and simply quitting for the night. Not a great feeling.
Firewatch is beautiful. Firewatch is intriguing. But ultimately I don't think Firewatch is very good. At its best, this is a quiet game about two characters struggling with real-life insecurities. But when that's sidelined to make room for a main plot, Firewatch suffers. It's a game perfect for trailers, a game full of excellent dialogue and breathtaking moments and stunning vistas that ultimately amounts to nothing much at all.
I enjoyed myself, though. The ABC Murders makes for lighthearted detective fare, clean and colorful like a Saturday morning cartoon. And make no mistake—when I say it cribs from Frogware's Sherlock Holmes games, I don't say it with any malice. I'd love to see more classic mysteries turned into adventure games, and Frogware just happens to be the current studio to beat.
Inkle is fast becoming one of my favorite studios. 80 Days was excellent. Sorcery is much the same, forsaking the off-kilter Victorian Age for a more cliched land of swords and spells and knavery—and yet, by some combination of Inkle's own talents and Steve Jackson's original source, managing to wring some truly compelling ideas from the game's thin sword-and-board pretenses.
I do not recommend you play this game.
The Witness has taken hold of my brain, both waking and sleeping. If I'm awake, I'm playing. If I'm not playing (for whatever reason) I'm inking possible solutions into a pad of graph paper. Writing this review I've solved two more puzzles and I think have a lead on a third. It's compulsive. When I'm done and this is all filed away, I'll go right back to playing.
Add in more than a few grammatical errors, some spelling mistakes, and a few bugs (the ending crawl described how one of my staffers both stayed at and simultaneously left the newspaper), and it's hard to recommend The Westport Independent. Which is a shame because I think it has at least one extremely important learn-by-example thing to say about media bias, and how it can manifest in something as simple as a lie of omission. That's a powerful message, and one it would be useful for more people to understand. To ask questions of the media, people need to understand how the media operates.
I imagine the day Gearbox gave Blackbird Interactive permission to use the Homeworld name was triumphant, but also terrifying. Triumphant because the project involved a lot of the original team members and they got to resurrect their mothballed series. Terrifying because doing so meant making a successor to—seriously—one of the best strategy games ever made, and doing so after twelve years of rose-colored glasses.
Rainbow Six Siege is, to me, an indicator that maybe we don't always need new genres of games as much as we need to reexamine our approach to old ones. It's not that anything Siege does is particularly new—tactical play (Counter-Strike, Arma, et cetera) mixed with a bit of destruction physics (Battlefield, Red Faction). But by taking these two aspects and expanding them to a scope supported by current hardware, Ubisoft has created a compelling game that feels unique.
Just Cause 3 embraces the series' dumb thrills to create a ridiculous sandbox orgy of wingsuits, tethers, and explosions.