Andrew Todd's Reviews
Pacing issues and minor quibbles aside, I had a lovely time with Tearaway Unfolded. The variety in environments and platforming mechanics, the music, the puzzles, the gibberish speech, and the sheer exuberant fun of it all bring to mind classic platformers like Banjo-Kazooie, which is a serious compliment coming from me.
Maybe I’ll never finish it, just so it’ll still be there for me.
EA's sequel gets lost in its open world.
I'm not sure Mass Effect: Andromeda is a bad game, but it is a colossally average game, drowning in its own feature list and quest journal.
Mafia III’s compelling narrative inevitably comes crashing down the moment it starts being an open-world action game.
Naughty Dog has capped off its flagship series with a visually stunning, viscerally thrilling adventure, and incredibly, the studio says it will push the PS4 even harder in its next game. I can't wait to see what that looks like.
If only The Division's visual design was so memorable. While its 1:1 recreation of a slice of Manhattan is achieved with stunning accuracy, its devotion to realism is also one of the game's biggest problems. For one thing, it dictates that the overworld, while enormous and detailed, is samey and uninteresting. But worse, it makes the gamier elements stick out awkwardly, and actually renders some of them boring.
Together, Mad Max and Just Cause 3 demonstrate that Avalanche is great at making games feel great. If it could just make the stories and gameplay less dull and repetitive, it'd have an all-timer on its hands. Because god damn - at its best, this game really is that much fun.
Mixed political messages and microtransactions aside, Rainbow Six Siege is a terrific, well-tuned multiplayer game. It's just hard to get the most out of it without friends.
FromSoftware's latest is typical of game sequels in that it's a refinement, not a revolution. This series' lore is so dense and so vague in its connections that there really isn't a "best" place to jump in, so newcomers might as well do so with this, the most polished game in the series. Veterans will relish the fresh challenges and twists, while reactions to the references to Soulses past will vary per player. But for all players, make no mistake: this is Dark Souls. What you get out of it is proportional to what you put in.
Like a three-legged dog or a cycloptic cat, it’s almost endearing in its jankiness.
For all the time-travel hocus pocus Remedy dropped into Quantum Break, the one superpower missing is the ability to get your time back.
There are moments when I f***ing adore Mad Max, and it feels awkward to attack it for trying too hard. But I really think The WB Open World Game is the wrong genre for the license, or at the very least the wrong application of genre.
Destiny: The Taken King is a testament to game-as-service that feels richer, less random, and more fun than the game Destiny started out as. It's telling that the base game is being phased out in favour of a "complete" package: this is much closer to what Destiny should have been from the beginning.
Fallout 4 keeps surprising and delighting me. Few other games have the depth or idiosyncratic character to get me consuming their content this greedily or obsessively. Clearly made by a passionate team, it's my favourite Bethesda game to date, and one of the finest games of the year, warts and all - one whose likely destruction of my already-struggling social life I welcome with open arms.
"Smoke and Mirrors" has converted me. Shorn of the need to introduce the game's world and characters, it quickly gets to business developing and telling a story with them.
For this wheel-spinning middle chapter, The Wolf Among Us sits back, chuckling at a crack it's made in the middle of an epic joke, while its audience restlessly waits for the punchline.
Continue?9876543210 asks big questions, whether direct or hinted. It doesn't provide answers, but perhaps that's the point. You see what you want to see.
Gravity Ghost is a prime demonstration of gameplay metaphor used for emotional effect, where everything has dual purposes and interconnects in clever ways. The story presentation may be obtuse, but that seems to be the point - it's about someone who's died trying to make sense of and fix what they've left behind. The result is a game full of understated melancholy and beauty.
Titanfall makes big AAA shooters fun again.